Tag: trust

Categories
Articles Rule of Law

Seeing justice done

This article appeared in today’s Sunday Times of Malta. 

In her Republic Day address, President Coleiro Preca stated that she believes “that the rule of law is as strong as the people acknowledge it to be, as much as they believe in it, cherish it, and continue to support it.” In her reference to the concept of “belief”, the President might have unintentionally struck an important chord that plays through the ongoing debate where the “rule of law” is concerned.

Seeing, in this period of Post-Truth Politics, is believing – even when what we see is a staged performance that is intended to reassure the emotional side of our thinking brains while at the same time numbing any rational reaction thereto. The phenomenon has been pigeonholed using various metaphors: the emperor’s clothes and Magritte’s pipe (ceci n’est pas une pipe) come to mind right now. Whole generations (particularly the baby-boomers) prize emotional sincerity over “the starchy pursuit of objective truth”.

Truth has been relegated to a relative importance in the list of priorities. It has to compete with the panoply of emotional expressions that have moved up on the popular agenda. The lack of forensic analysis, when people stop questioning the facts, has also meant that society has less time for ‘experts’. There is no trust in them. The Brexit and Trump phenomena followed on the heels of the financial crisis of 2008 when trust ratings in experts plummeted.

The collapse of trust is dangerous. As Matthew d’Ancona (who I rely upon quite liberally in this article) states “… all successful societies rely upon a relatively high degree of honesty to preserve order, uphold the law, hold the powerful to account and generate prosperity”.

Without the real value of truth our gauge of what the people appreciate shifts dramatically. Law, the rule of law, is not about faith. The very concept of a working system under the rule of law is not designed to work depending on the number of believers in the system. There is a word for a system based on belief: Religion. The rule of law is not about faith. Nor is it about hope – hope that justice is done. The danger of misinterpreting the phrase “seeing that justice is done” is based on the simple fact that it is part of a larger whole.

Fearne brought up ‘the rule of law’ often and it was like the devil quoting scriptures

The full phrase in fact is, “Not only must justice be done, it must be seen to be done”. Remove the first part – actually and linguistically – and you get an act of prestidigitation, where you are made to believe that something is there when it is not. Such a magic act requires a theatrical appeal to emotional intelligence of the highest kind: it not only requires that you believe but also that you suspend that belief and actually believe what you are being told that you should see.

“Seeing justice done” should in fact be the final act of a progression of events that include justice actually being meted out. In the past weeks we have seen the concept of the rule of law twisted and turned beyond recognition. The danger is that people begin to believe that what they see in action is the rule of law when actually it is the rule by law. In his Commentary on the Constitution Tonio Borg sets out the distinction clearly: “So the rule of law is a concept which gauges not just the number of laws enacted but their nature and direction. It is also a political concept so that something, which is clearly within the parameters of the law, may still go against the rule of law in spirit.”

Watching Chris Fearne squirm to Tim Sebastian’s questioning on the Conflict Zone (DeutscheWelle) was not pleasant. Fearne brought up “the rule of law” often and it was like the devil quoting scriptures. The Prime Minister appealing in court in order to stop inquiries, redacted contracts because commercial interests trump public interest, quoting laws in order to prevent sharing of information regarding passport buyers… that is just an aperitif.

We have naively called the new religion out as spin. It is not just spin. It is a dangerous belief system that is supplanting what should be a concrete system based on law and inspired by natural justice. Bringing three men before the courts of law for the heinious murder of a journalist can never be seen as the final curtain call that proves that all is well in the state of the Republic.

Believe me, it is not.

Jacques Zammit is a référendaire at the Court of Justice of the European Union and one of the founders of the Advocates for the Rule of Law. Opinions expressed in this article are strictly personal.

Categories
Campaign 2013 Zolabytes

Post Ranier – a zolabyte

A reader of this blog was inspired to write an essay-like comment after the post entitled “Your politics are ruining my country (and its future)“. I’ve decided to put it up as a Zolabyte in the hope that it provokes more conversation. Philip Serracino Inglott (currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the Philosophy of Technology at Delft writes:

Thanks for pointing out Ranier’s article, which set my mind reeling. Here’s a brain dump of the thoughts I had after reading this and Ranier’s articles:

It’s nice to see Ranier put a wager upon PN’s technical ability. The implication of his argument is: if it should turn our that PL plan works, this would mean that Austin and Gonzi are either incompetent, or they intentionally deceived the population, or both. If the PL plan were to fail, Ranier would have to call for Muscat’s and Konrad’s heads, but equally, should it succeed he’d have to be the first to call for Austin and Gonzi’s heads.

Of course the corollary to that is that when the PL claim that they are certain that their plan will work, they are implying that they are equally certain that Austin and Gonzi are incompetent, or that they intentionally deceived the population, or both.

That much, I guess, they’d willingly do. But the implication is much more onerous than that for this case. The level of incompetence and/or deceit is variable. It finally depends on the magnitude of the project or importance of the decision in the context of which it was done, in comparison to how easy or trivial it would have been to see and/or avoid.

When PL’s plan is compressed to its raw basic essentials its basically this: borrow a bunch of money from private investors; spend that money switching from HFO to Gas; Gas can be bought cheaply enough that we can pay off the debt for the conversion, the past debts, and still have left over to pass on to the consumer as reduced tariffs. The private investor who lends us the money gets to keep on selling us the gas/electricity for a long time after we have sorted it all out. So, sure, he/she’ll get a tidy profit too, but that is why he/she’ll invest in the first place. It’s that simple really. Just that one basic idea — switch to gas — is going to solve of high tariff problem. The rest is details that require a lot of work to sort out, but should be run of the mill really.

But, if this is actually it, then Gonzi and Austin are not merely incompetent and/or deceitful. If the crux of it all is the choice between gas and HFO, then Gonzi and Austin must be stupid idiots and/or criminally fraudulent, if not both. And that would be very serious indeed. If the PL plan is to succeed on the basis of the documentation revealed up to now; if that is all a voter needs to know to be confident that PL’s plan will succeed; I can see no way that, once elected, PL is not also morally obliged to investigate the current cabinet for fraud and criminal negligence for their approval of the use of HFO.

Of course, the much more realistic scenario is that there are many more variables. The truth is that the analysis required to know if the plan is worth voting for is way more complex. Even if in the future the current government will, with hindsight, be shown to have made a humongous mistake by going for HFO, the matter is complex enough that one cannot draw a straight line from there to the claim that the level of incompetence would have been criminal.

But then, this means that the whole ‘energy solution campaign thing’ going on is just a charade. That there is no way that a deep enough analysis can be brought to voters until March, with sufficient detail, that they can make up their mind rationally. As Michal Falzon seems to have implied (from Ranier’s wording), voters with have to vote on an act of faith. And that is not democracy at all! That is merely herding behavior!

So PL and PN have put themselves in a rather sad position, unless they are willing to admit that the current trend in the campaign is undermining democracy, they have to up the ante, and imply that the other side is consciously and malevolently trying to deceive and de-fraud the citizen!

They have to imply that the others are not just “not as good as us” but that they are “evil!”. Since both sides play the game the election becomes a “final judgment” that determines who is on “the dark side” and who “has the force with them”. If any of the big 2 parties actually mean anything of what their garbled propaganda implies about their opponent, we would have to have a court marshal of the fresh opposition after every election.

Thank goodness, the only party that actually means all of the claims that it makes is the little green fellow with the good ideas but no clout or voice. After all, if AD had a bigger role to play in our political scene many of these silly charades would be quickly exposed, and we might have to actually think and evaluate substantial proposals before voting.

And who wants to do that?

*****
Zolabytes is a rubrique on J’accuse – the name is a nod to the original J’accuser (Emile Zola) and a building block of the digital age (byte). Zolabytes is intended to be a collection of guest contributions in the spirit of discussion that has been promoted by J’accuse on the online Maltese political scene for 7 years.
Opinions expressed in zolabyte contributions are those of the author in question. Opinions appearing on zolabytes do not necessarily reflect the editorial line of J’accuse the blog.
***