In October 2017, Daphne Caruana Galizia, an investigative journalist who relentlessly exposed high level corruption in Malta, was killed by a car bomb that was triggered by a text message. At the time of her death she faced 47 libel suits in local courts – including five counts of criminal libel. As her son Matthew told a US Senate committee five months later, the libel actions originated from “party officials and donors, including the Prime Minister and his closest aides … 95% of the cases were filed by men who are powerful, wealthy, or both.”
Late last week, police charged Yorgen Fenech, a wealthy local businessmen, with complicity in Galizia’s murder. In December 2017 three men were charged with carrying out the actual murder but despite considerable evidence gathered by the police, there has been little progress towards a trial since then. Fenech denied the charges and alleged that members of prime minister Joseph Muscat’s inner circle – including his former chief of staff and the former Tourism Minister – had ordered the killing.
On Tuesday, Sophie In’t Veld, head of the European Parliament delegation, which recently visited Malta to review its observance of the rule of law, stated that she was “not reassured” by her meeting with the prime minister and his Justice Minister Owen Bonnici. In’t Veld called on Muscat – who had announced on Sunday that he intended to resign in a few months – to step down immediately. Shortly before Muscat announced his decision, nearly 20,000 citizens called for his resignation at a protest outside a courthouse in the capital.
Daphne Caruana Galizia’s journalism struck at the corrupt heart of Malta’s financial and political elite. In recent years senior local officials have reportedly enabled money laundering, the sale of passports – which grant full access to the EU (a scheme which may have yielded up to €2.5 billion), and a great deal of other chicanery. Her exposés revealed the global implications of these crimes, and highlighted the need for international scrutiny of places like Malta, little noticed locales where Eastern European and Middle Eastern malefactors can easily dodge global anti-corruption measures with the help of a few pliant politicians and bureaucrats. As her son Matthew told the Senate: “What happens in Malta does not stay in Malta. A US law firm and a US court are being used to silence critical media covering financial crimes … Kickbacks to government officials are denominated in dollars… Facilitator states like Malta hope to continue in the business of laundering large sums of money from kleptocratic regimes and criminal and terrorist organisations without suffering any of the negative externalities.”
At a time when a Washington Post columnist can be killed, and dismembered in a Saudi embassy, on the orders of a prince who remains friendly with the US President and the son-in-law he has tasked with Middle East diplomacy, justice for Ms Caruana Galizia – however delayed, however imperfect – is welcome news. Especially given the odds against Malta’s deeply flawed institutions bringing the intellectual author of the murder of its fiercest critic belatedly to justice. As Matthew Galizia, who was part of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) team that won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the Panama Papers – noted in a tribute to his mother: “A culture of impunity has been allowed to flourish by the government in Malta. It is of little comfort for the Prime Minister of this country to say that he will ‘not rest’ until the perpetrators are found, when he heads a government that encouraged that same impunity. First he filled his office with crooks, then he filled the police with crooks and imbeciles, then he filled the courts with crooks and incompetents. If the institutions were already working, there would be no assassination to investigate – and my brothers and I would still have a mother.”
The cynicism of that culture of impunity may be gauged from the fact that shortly after Galizia’s death, a police sergeant in charge of investigating the case wrote, on Facebook: “Everyone gets what they deserve, cow dung! Feeling happy :)” Sadly there are many places throughout the Americas where similarly despicable gestures routinely occur.
A large part of the reason why Caruana Galizia’s case turned out differently was that her murder provoked international outrage and sustained scrutiny that Malta’s weak and corrupt institutions could not evade. It is a lesson about the importance of insisting on the rule of law that ought to resonate far beyond the local setting in which it took place.
