PR 201337 – “Press Release from the Office of the President” does not feature on the DOI Press Release page. It should be there since PR 201336 and PR 201338 are both on the page. I tried to find out whether the President’s Office that has its own PRO had distributed the PR through the DOI. Unfortunately Caroline Muscat, theShiftNews editor, could not confirm because – get this – the DOI refuses to add theShiftNews to the newsroom list.
Why does the President (and for what matters, even the Speaker of the House) use the DOI for his PR? Shouldn’t they have their own PR office issuing its own press releases? But those are not the glitches in our democracy that we are here to comment today. We are more concerned with the content of the PR 201337 because it concerns the long-awaited disquisition by the President (upon advice of anonymous legal experts) concerning the issue of the Leader of the Opposition in the House (LOOH for short).
Let us begin from the end. At the end of his statement, the President invokes the Principle of Necessity as the underlying reason for his decision. The beauty of the use of this principle is that it sets the minds at rest of all those who disagree with the interpretation favoured by the President and his men (and Adrian Delia of course). Why so? Well the reason is simple. The Principle of Necessity is used as a last resort in the words of the medieval jurist Henry de Bracton “when that which is otherwise not lawful is made lawful by necessity”.
In layman’s terms the President is saying that he is conscious of the unlawfulness of his decision and interpretation but a higher necessity required him to rule in such a manner anyway. It would be facile to blame the President’s medical background but that would mean ignoring the legal savants who deemed this perilous advice to be good enough for him to administer on the nation.
Said advisors skimmed through Article 90’s inherent contradictions and in lieu of providing a solution based on law, they chose to apply the aforementioned Doctrine of Necessity: an unlawful solution in the better interests of… There lies the crux… the better interests of whom? In the words of the President this would be the “protection of the democratic process and the serene atmosphere which must reign in Parliament and in the country in general”.
In opting for this doctrine the President’s advisors steamrollered over any consideration concerning article 90 other than the admission that a combined reading of 90(4) and 90(2) could result in revoking and appointing Adrian Delia ad infinitum. Having discarded the possibility of leaving the LOOH office vacant (there will be a LOOH according to article 90 has been read as there will be one at all times) the solution was simple: we keep him there because it is a remedy for serenity.
The ball was then thrown into the political party court (from whence it came) with the President washing his hands of the problem and saying “come back when you have a new leader of the party or when you have solved your trust issues”.
Which begs the question. How serene and progressive is our parliamentary democracy when a President reads the constitution (unlawfully by his own admission) in such a way as to impose a LOOH on the opposition who has lost the trust of 2/3 of them?
The press pounced on the words ‘depart from the constitution’ when reporting the President’s Press Release. It’s worse. He openly broke it. “That which is otherwise not lawful” remember?
George Vella fought the law and Adrian Delia has won. Time to quote Swift again…
“It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities, to justify the most iniquitous opinions; and the judges never fail of decreeing accordingly.”
– Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
