Even as we demand that justice in Daphne Caruana Galizia’s case is served without any further delay, our concerns today are more profound than they were in our shock and anger on the afternoon of 16 October 2017.
- We find that the political leadership of the government and the party in government has not repudiated the actions and failures of Joseph Muscat’s government.
- We find that the police have not brought to prosecution any of their investigations into dozens of crimes in which senior members of Joseph Muscat’s regime have been compellingly implicated by evidence that has been in the public domain for years. As to conviction and punishment, these remain even further distant.
- We find that the unlimited and unchecked power of the prime minister within our institutional framework remains in practice unhindered and uninhibited.
- We find that people in political leadership are as willing as ever to exploit their authority for personal interests.
- We find that the police remain poorly equipped and persistently fail to give us any form of confidence in their willingness, their ability and a combination of both to ensure that the law rules.
- We find that the prosecution service remains under-resourced and nowhere near anything capable of giving honest citizens equality of arms with powerful criminal defendants.
- We find that parliament is entirely captured by the government and unable or unwilling to oversee and call out administrative failings or wrongdoing, or to bring forward legislative reform to address weaknesses that are there for all to see.
- We find that the standing of politicians and public officers in the community has diminished, collectively tarnished by the misconduct of, and the impunity enjoyed by, those among them who are corrupt or who are unwilling to stand up to the corrupt, creating an ominous mistrust in the democratic process.
- We find that appointments made to the judiciary over the past 8 years put into serious question the independence of the judiciary from government control and influence.
- We find a TV media landscape that is stacked against pluralism, restricted instead to a cacophony of partisan untruths that political parties have no qualms in using to assault critical and independent thinking.
- As a result, we are not surprised then to find a tired, sceptical citizenry, detached from interminable and unproductive partisan feuds, preferring to believe the mafia does not exist, allowing it thereby to tighten its invisible but firm grip on the formal and informal power structures of the country.
We remain firm in our belief that we must continue to hope in meaningful change. That we must hope that the exemplary and selfless determination of Daphne Caruana Galizia, which her family has so demonstrably inherited, will drive us to continue to believe that our country can emerge from this darkness.
We must hope that the efforts of this Inquiry to ask pointed questions and the conclusions it has yet to draw up may have the cathartic and transformative impact the life, work and death of Daphne Caruana Galizia should have had.