Human rights deserve better than posturing vanity

By the time you read this, no doubt the usual suspects will already have concluded that anyone criticising the government’s Human Rights Commission Bill must obviously be against human rights.

Some will probably manage to throw The Hon. Rosianne Cutajar personally into the mix for good measure. It is the standard script: if you question the drafting, the consultation or the governance, you must oppose the principle itself.

It is a wonderfully convenient argument. It also happens to be nonsense.

Malta needs a strong human rights framework. That is beyond serious dispute. The Paris Principles envisage independent national human rights institutions, and it is, or should be, a given that Malta aspires to meet those standards.

The question has never been whether we should strengthen human rights. The question is whether government has gone about it in the right way.

One can make a perfectly respectable argument that before creating another institution, government should first have asked why existing mechanisms, so often under-resourced, under-used or, like the Ombudsman, generally ignored, could not have been adapted or modified, rather than create yet another clunking QUANGO, as such beasts are sometimes called.

Read my lips, oiks at Super One: education matters, enforcement matters and public confidence matters. Have you contributed to enhancing these aspects?  Have you buggery!

Remember the disgraceful abuse directed at Labour’s own Muslim candidate during the election campaign. That episode exposed prejudice on all sides, but particularly on Labour’s side, in a way that no Act of Parliament could ever remedy. Laws don’t eradicate prejudice; decency does.

But let’s get back to the government’s mishandling of the Bill.

Civil society organisations, NGOs and practitioners repeatedly asked for broader consultation. They were not trying to derail the legislation. They were asking to improve it. When the people who spend their lives defending human rights ask to be heard, the appropriate response is not to flounce off and mount the closest high horse.

It is to pull up a chair and sit down with people who might, just maybe, know a bit about the subject. Human rights legislation is not a sprint. It is constitutional architecture. One generally wants to make sure the foundations are sound before pouring the concrete.  If that means talking to people and spending as many hours as it takes to listen to them, or to convince them that they’re wrong, for that matter, so be it.

The PN was criticised for refusing to participate in what it regarded as an inadequate process. People are free to disagree with that decision, but it is difficult to condemn an Opposition for refusing to rubberstamp legislation when many of the very organisations working in the field were saying exactly the same thing: consult more.

Then there is the question of appointments. Independence is not simply about appointing good people. It is about having a process that is visibly independent, transparent and commands public confidence. Greater clarity would have strengthened the legislation immeasurably even on this basis alone, especially when you remember that some people appointed to important offices were and are right plonkers.

None of this argues against a national human rights institution. Quite the reverse. It argues that because such an institution matters.

Winning elections entitles a government to govern. It does not entitle it to assume that consultation is an inconvenience or that criticism is disloyalty. The strongest institutions are built not by those who think they already know everything, but by those who are prepared to listen before pouring the concrete.