Malta¶
The Maltese cases show how a state can bear responsibility for a killing without anyone being held to account for commissioning it. The inquiry placed the cause in an atmosphere of impunity spreading from the centre of government, a finding about conduct and culture that no statute repeals and no criminal trial is built to test. Criminal justice has dealt with individuals, while the network the inquiry described, where political power and business meet, remains.
The clerk’s briefs¶
From the clerks, for the Patrician’s eyes
Read these, for what has already happened. Journalists investigating the same networks know the state was found responsible for the climate around the last killing, and that the man charged with ordering it has, for now, been acquitted. Some may step back, and editors may think twice. Those who would silence a journalist learn that commissioning a killing is hard to prove. A successful appeal, or reforms that carry out the inquiry’s recommendations, could restore some deterrence; neither has yet arrived.
September 2026: The verdict¶
On 2 September 2026 a jury in Valletta found Yorgen Fenech not guilty of complicity in the murder and of criminal association, by eight votes to one on each charge. The prosecution is expected to appeal. In July the Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation had said that “most of its recommendations remain unimplemented”, five years after the public inquiry. The clerks note that nobody now stands convicted of commissioning the killing, and that most of the inquiry’s remedies are still unapplied.
July 2021: The state shoulders it¶
On 29 July 2021 the public inquiry into the assassination of the journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia found that “the State has to shoulder responsibility for the assassination”. It found the state had failed to recognise the real and immediate risk to her life, and that it had “created an atmosphere of impunity” generated “from the highest levels in the heart of the administration of the Office of the Prime Minister”. The government of Joseph Muscat had opposed the inquiry until a Council of Europe deadline forced it. The clerks note that the inquiry found no proof of state participation in the killing, and a great deal about the climate it happened in.