“There’s the King’s Messenger. He’s in prison now, being punished: and the trial doesn’t even begin till next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all.”

“Suppose he never commits the crime?” said Alice.

“That would be better, wouldn’t it?”

– From Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll

This morning, the magistrates’ court handed down what can best be described as an interesting judgement in the case The Police vs Daphne Caruana Galizia.

This was my prosecution over the course of seven years for writing of my experiences at the hands of Police Inspector Anglu Farrugia, under 27-hour detention and interrogation, during the dark days of Lorry Pullicino in 1984, when I was 19 years old.

I had written about those experiences several times before, but Farrugia went ballistic when I wrote about them again on 15 May 2003, while he was campaigning to become leader of the Malta Labour Party following Sant’s second electoral defeat.

I wrote that he wasn’t fit to lead the party because the person who leads the party will one day become prime minister.

And Malta cannot have a prime minister who, in his days as a police inspector, forced a 19-year-old girl to sign a false confession which he himself had written, telling her that if she did not do so, she would be returned to the pitch-black cell, with faeces-smeared walls and a metal bucket for a lavatory, where she had been kept for the past 27 hours.

The magistrate said in his judgement that it was my word against former inspector Farrugia’s, and so I had not proven beyond doubt the facts of which I wrote. Because of that, he convicted me for criminal defamation and fined me.

But how could I have proved the facts? The only witness was Anglu Farrugia himself.

By the magistrate’s reasoning, all those who are ill-treated under interrogation – and like me, there were so many back then – cannot ever speak or write about their experiences because the only witnesses, should they be sued by the perpetrators or prosecuted by the police on their behalf, are the perpetrators themselves.

And the perpetrators are obviously going to lie through their back teeth, just as Anglu Farrugia did. Perhaps the magistrates’ court thinks I am in the habit of going about signing confessions to 11 crimes I did not commit, including attacking a police officer – PC 710 – who grabbed me by the throat, hauled me off the ground and punched me in the chest during a demonstration against the government’s – ahem – education policies.

The extraordinary thing is that the magistrate ignored a judgement handed down in 1984 by the then magistrate, now judge, David Scicluna, who recognised the truth of every word I said when I testified before him, and threw out of court the ‘confession’ that Inspector Anglu Farrugia produced as evidence against me, because it was false and obtained through the use of threats.

I remember Magistrate Scicluna back in 1984 being visibly appalled to hear me describe my treatment at the hands of Inspector Farrugia. I, on the other hand, just counted my blessings: I had got out alive and with my limbs in one piece. Others had not.

I stand by everything I wrote. I have been consistent in my version of events since 1984. It was not only my right to describe those events and to say that, because of them – and for other reasons – Anglu Farrugia is not fit to be prime minister. It was my duty to do so. It would have been a dereliction of that duty to conceal the sordid circumstances of my iarrest and interrogation at the hands of Anglu Farrugia, on not one but 11 trumped-up charges.

Further proof of his lack of fitness to lead the Labour Party or become prime minister is his use of the police to silence journalists or exact retribution against them. The fact that a law exists does not mean you should use it. Britain repealed its criminal defamation law last year, but long before that it had become a dead letter. Can you imagine the consequences for David Miliband if he were to ask the police to prosecute somebody who wrote something about him, after his brother beat him to the Labour leadership?

He would be eaten alive by the media.

But Malta is not a real democracy. There is no culture of democracy or of free expression. Forty-six years after the end of colonialsm, the mentality remains that of frightened serfs.

People in general do not understand what democracy is, but think it is a vote in a general election or a referendum. They fail to understand that for democracy to exist, freedom of expression must come first – that when a sentence like this is handed down, it has significant and negative consequences for the country as a whole.

Our rights to free expression – which saw a brief moment of glory back then – are being systematically eroded more effectively than when the Labour Party used to burn down newspaper buildings and Opposition Party clubs and ransack the homes of those who opposed it. We joined the European Union only to end up with the mentality of a North African state. Look at the criminal defamation map of the world and you will see what I mean.

Across the entire European Union, only eight people were sentenced for criminal defamation over the course of three years, and they were all in Spain and Poland.

That is why I am appealing against the judgement. If the appeal fails, I will go to the Constitutional Court. And if that fails, I am taking my case to the European Court of Human Rights.

I will also upload, on a regular basis starting frrom this evening, the article that is at the centre of this particular storm, the article which Anglu Farrugia, in his deluded self-belief, thinks was responsible for his not being chosen as party leader. Because Labour’s delegati read what I write before they take a decision, I don’t think.

It’s double jeopardy: you can’t be tried for the same crime twice.

I repeat: Anglu Farrugia forced me to sign a false confession which he had written himself. And then he lied about it to save his skin.