Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/897139
maltatoday SUNDAY 5 NOVEMBER 2017 Opinion 24 . . .t hough according to the same proverb, they also 'grind exceeding small'. So while it may take an eternity for the Creator of Heaven and Earth to deliver Universal Justice... when He does get round to it, you can rest assured His adjudication will be final, absolute and flawless down to the tiniest of details. But that's just Him. And it helps a little that He is also 'omniscient', 'omnipotent' and 'infallible' in every way... not to mention an embodiment of 'infinite goodness and mercy'. I mean, with credentials like those... you can't really ever go wrong as a judge, can you? Sadly, however, down here in the non-celestial dimension 'omniscience' and 'infallibility' are in rather short supply at the moment. (The situation regarding 'omnipotence' is slightly different, but I'll come to that part later.) The 'mills of Maltese justice' also grind slowly... very slowly indeed, at times... but unlike the case with Divine Justice, we don't have the luxury of blind, dogmatic faith in the eventual precision of their grinding. There is, in brief, no guarantee that justice will actually be served, no matter how long the wait. I suppose it's the same everywhere: after all, the institutions we are talking about in Malta right now – the police, the attorney general's office, the law-courts, the various regulatory authorities, etc – are all human contrivances; and therefore, by definition, fallible. But there seems to be a consistent pattern in their fallibility. That, I believe, lies at the heart of the current malaise with Malta's institutional set-up. It's not so much that the institutions themselves do not function at all... in which case, the rule of law will really have collapsed; or that they do not function perfectly... which is a slightly unrealistic expectation anyway. It's more that they cannot be trusted to function properly... or even for the right reasons. And while the time factor only adds to the frustration, it also sometimes serves as an indicator of precisely why our institutions are often so unreliable in practice. Some cases take years, if not decades, to reach closure; others are investigated, prosecuted, tried and determined in record time. At this point, no one will be surprised to discover that what sets those two patterns apart, in most cases, is the extent to which the outcome may affect the powers that be. When I sat down to write this article, I drew up a very quick mental list of past criminal cases which were 'questionable' for this very reason. I'll mention a few random instances: on the eve of the 2008 election, AD chairman Harry Vassallo was served with an arrest warrant for failing to present VAT receipts (of a company which had been inactive for years). The warrant itself had been issued five months earlier. Yet the police chose to act on it only during election week. A few years later, in 2012, a Sliema bar owner by the name of Chris Engerer was arrested for drug possession, just four days after his son Cyrus had resigned from the Nationalist Party and publicly switched his allegiance to Labour. Interestingly, the charge sheet specified drug possession 'over the preceding five years'. Neither case may be earth- shattering in itself; probably even less so, in the context of a claimed 'melt-down' of the rule of law. But I mentioned those examples (and not, say, the 1986 frame-up of Pietru Pawl Busuttil, which at its heart revolved around the same issue) because it is very often the smaller cases which reveal the sheer strength of the grip of politics on the justice system. Heavy-handed measures only seem that much more draconian, when applied to smaller fry (especially when the bigger fish are ignored). Besides: even at a glance, you can see they have a certain something in common. In both those instances, the police could easily have made arrests a good long while before they did: five months in Vassallo's case, five whole years in Engerer's. But by a strangely persistent coincidence, they chose to time their actions The mills of God grind slowly... Raphael Vassallo How do we even justify our national tendency to pick and choose which cases to investigate, which to ignore... and which to simply keep dragging out indefinitely? The Flying Carpet Importers of hand-knotted Oriental carpets THE FLYING CARPET - OLD RAILWAY TRACK, ATTARD Mon - Tues, Thurs - Sat 10am – 12pm • Wednesday morning closed Mon - Fri – 4.30pm - 7pm Importers of: Various hand knotted carpets and Kilims, Non Slip Underlay, Dry and Liquid shampoo. Mobile No. 7953 7664