Egg on their faces
The local morality police have suffered a rather humiliating reverse with this eminently sensible decision by Magistrate Antonio Mizzi.
On 23rd January I had expressed my amazament at the fact that the police had got into this in the first place. Is it possible that after so many decades as an independent nation we have not understood the basic distinction between church and state and between sin and crime?
I do hope that a full explanation will be given to the taxpayer as to why scarce resources were wasted in a silly attempt at preventing people from enjoying their basic personal freedoms.
3 Comments:
I think the process ably demonstrates two things Piet.
Firstly, that the Home Affairs Minister is able to act decisively. Don’t forget thousands of women are forced into prostitution within our borders – and Europe is now our border. In one sense he aligned himself to the mayor of Amsterdam's crackdowns against unlicensed brothels [not nightclubs true but the idea was to target money laundering and human trafficking, not prostitution per se].
Secondly, the process was a fine demonstration of the judiciary protecting civil liberties. Magistrate Mizzi ought also to be congratulated for stopping well short of declaring all denizens of the law courts demi-gods. He interpreted the law and no more and for that he earns my eternal gratitude.
Was the minister heavy handed? - yea sure he could have counted the g-strings and subtracted them from the number of work-permits issued which might have reduced the burden on Joe taxpayer somewhat. But he chose to act “tough” – in what is clearly a very high-stakes game. He therefore acted responsibly and ought also to be congratulated.
I was under the impression that the raid was very much a spur of the moment thing which took place because ANR were due to hold a press conference in Paceville dealing with irregular foreign workers in entertainment establishments.
The authorities might have wanted to take the wind out of ANR's sails (in fact, the press conference was cancelled). Since all the people arrested had regular work permits there simply weren't any grounds to proceed - The result was a foregone conclusion which left all concerned looking silly and, as Pietru pointed out, wasted lots of tax money - unforgiveable.
On the other hand, when one notes the nationalities of the people involved, one sees that a fairly large number are not EU citizens - why the authorities appear to be issuing work permits with such ease is something which should be looked into.
The same goes for the huge numbers of foreign labourers employed by Skanska who are making life miserable for residents of Msida with their rowdy, drunken carousing till the early hours of the morning - Friends from the area tell me that they are at their wits' end and are counting down the days till when the hospital is finally finished and they can go back to living a civilised existence.
Hello deep diver. It wasn't my intention to offer a comprehensive model of causality on the rationale behind the raid. I'm sure there are highly complex circular feedback systems at work here: threats that emanate from within (e.g. extremist action such as arson) and without (e.g. money laundering, trafficking of people and illegal substances, gun running, etc).
In the circumstances the risks were high enough to justify that decision. Congratulations are therefore due in my humble opinion.
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