Without prejudice to the presumption of innocence of the persons charged with perpetrating Daphne’s killing or with being accomplices therein, it appears clear that the alleged assassins acted on the instructions of ‘clients’ or ‘bosses’ who engaged them or ordered them to commit the crime. The boss or bosses too will have felt it would be unlikely for them to face any consequence for doing so. In part, it may be presumed that they thought so because murder by car-bomb appeared to be a police-proof method of eliminating enemies.
In part, however, it is a result of a systematic failure of the State to enforce the law in crimes committed by people of influence.
Fourteen days before Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed, Chief Justice Silvio Camilleri said in a public speech:
“The rule of law cannot rule if the laws are not applied and enforced. The laws need to be enforced by the authorities empowered to do so. If the persons in these authorities (the police and the Attorney General) do not do their duties impartially and independently, the rule of law will be undermined. Every system ultimately depends on the persons entrusted with its functioning. Should they fail, we would have just a façade, a façade of distraction and alienation without substance. Should there be punishment for some but not for others, the courts would no longer be the administrators of justice, but become the administrators of injustice.”5
There is a context in which this declaration must be framed which, given the coincidence of time and place, is also the context in which Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed two weeks later.