Malta told to free its secrets: Commonwealth demands FOI overhaul and end to 90-year-old sedition law

Malta has been told to tear down the legal walls that still hide public information and to finally erase the crime of “sedition” from its statute books, in a hard-hitting new report released by the Commonwealth Secretariat in Valletta yesterday. The 196-page peer-review – the first since Malta joined the club of nations in 1964 – concludes that the island’s 2008 Freedom of Information Act is “outdated, over-priced and routinely flouted”, while the 1933 sedition law inherited from the British empire remains a “sword hanging over journalists, satirists and street poets alike”.

For a country that prides itself on being the EU’s most densely populated democracy, the findings sting. Commonwealth inspectors spent a week interviewing whistle-blowers, civil servants, magistrates and artists. They sat in on a court hearing where a 23-year-old rapper faces up to three months in prison for lyrics criticising the police, and they visited the National Archives where files on the 1970s political assassinations are still stamped “Not Available Until 2050”. Their verdict: Malta’s culture of secrecy is “choking the national conversation” and “distorting the island’s collective memory”.

Lead author Dr. Ayisha Osori, a Nigerian human-rights lawyer, told Hot Malta: “Every Maltese citizen is entitled to ask what their taxes bought, why a permit was granted, or who lobbied for a hospital contract. Yet we found a system that treats FOI requests like an act of charity, not a right.” The report reveals that 62 % of requests to core ministries last year were either refused or met with “exorbitant” photocopying fees – €150 for 30 pages in one case – while appeal deadlines are so short that many citizens simply give up.

Local activists say the timing is explosive. Daphne Caruana Galizia’s family, who attended the report’s launch in Upper Barrakka Gardens, welcomed the recommendation to criminalise SLAPP lawsuits and to create an independent FOI Commissioner with power to override ministerial veto. “My mother was investigating the hospitals deal when she was killed,” said Paul Caruana Galizia. “Had she enjoyed a proper right to access documents, the story might have been published sooner and the pressure to silence her might have been weaker.”

The sedition chapter strikes an equally raw nerve. Drafted in 1933 to suppress anti-colonial newspapers, the law makes it a crime to “bring into hatred or contempt” the government or the judiciary. Although no-one has been jailed since 1977, police still use it to threaten protestors. Last Carnival, a Gozitan float depicting a minister as a pantomime clown triggered a formal police warning; three years earlier, poet Immanuel Mifsud was hauled in for questioning after reciting a verse about “corruption dressed in ermine”.

Culture Minister Owen Bonnici, speaking off-camera, admitted the law is “anachronistic” but warned against “opening floodgates that could destabilise institutions”. Reporters Without Borders rank Malta 84th globally for media freedom – below Namibia and Mongolia – and the Commonwealth team concludes that repealing sedition is “a low-cost, high-symbolism step that would signal Malta’s transition from colonial subject to confident republic”.

Ordinary Maltese have mixed feelings. In a straw poll outside Valletta’s law courts, pensioner Rita Camilleri, 71, recalled how her father hid British-banned Labour newspapers under floorboards: “They called that sedition then; today we call it history. Let the young write what they want.” But taxi driver Clayton Pace, 45, fears “total disrespect” if the law goes. “Already kids swear at police online. Remove sedition and what’s left?”

The report gives Malta 18 months to act or face suspension from the Commonwealth’s human-rights arm. Recommendations include:

– Scrap all fees for FOI requests below 100 pages
– Reduce response time from 40 to 15 working days
– Publish contracts over €50,000 online by default
– Abolish sedition and replace it with narrow incitement offences
– Introduce a public-interest override for state secrets older than 15 years

Civil-society coalition Repubblika will hold a “Right to Know” rally on Sunday, marching from Castille to the Triton Fountain armed with photocopied pages blacked out by censors. Activist Manuel Delia says the issue transcends party politics: “Whether you vote red, blue or green, your grandmother’s medical contract and your child’s school tender belong to you. Information is the new bread; let’s stop rationing it.”

As the sun sets over Grand Harbour, the question facing Robert Abela’s government is whether it can turn Commonwealth criticism into a national reset, or whether Malta will remain an island where history is locked in dusty boxes and the future is written in whispers. For a nation that sells itself to tourists as an open-air museum, the greatest exhibit may still be hidden in the dark.