His dog's throat was cut, the door of his apartment was set on fire, one of his informants was stabbed in the back, he was harassed in a public place, he was taken into police custody, and finally he was blown up.

Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, a mother of three, was murdered in an EU member state in the 21st century, on October 16, 2017, by detonating a bomb hidden in her car.

Among the perpetrators, two defendants have now been sentenced to 40 years in prison each, a taxi driver was previously sentenced to 15 years in prison, and a main defendant, who financed the whole thing, is still awaiting sentencing. However, no charges were brought against the former Prime Minister, Joseph Muscat, even though it was proven that he had quite a lot to do with the case.

The story is, of course, much more complicated than that, because according to the interpretation of the murder in the Panama files released in 2015, the whole of Malta is nothing more than a state-financed criminal organization. There was everything that could be seen here, bribery of government officials, money laundering, embezzlement, police overreach. And Daphne Caruana Galizia "dug" too deep, that's why she had to die.

However, this is not the real scandal. The real scandal is the way the whole case was handled by the European Union, or more precisely, it barely did anything to reveal the background of the murder. Yet the Maltese journalists complained that instead of the government investigating the results of their investigations, they were ignored and even intimidated by the people of Muscat.

That's why the EU took a few steps against the Maltese government at the time, just for the sake of appearances, but it was roughly equivalent to applying cold water to a dead fish.

The President of the European Parliament at the time, Antonio Tajani, traveled to Malta to rebuke Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, who later resigned, but the Brussels administration considered the matter settled for a long time.

Quote from the American newspaper The Atlantic:

“The case of Daphne Caruana Galizia was the fifth fatal car bomb attack in Malta in recent years, and the other cases have not been solved.

It may take time to clarify the circumstances of the journalist's murder, but the question is whether Malta's institutions have the political will to do so."

But it wasn't just down to the Maltese, as in the EU the whole murder was treated as an act that is a foreign "body" in a democratic country, the system and that's how the justice system works, so everything is fine. They did not draw any general conclusions about the democracy deficit of the entire structure, the intertwining of the international underworld and the Maltese government, and of course not the skimming of boring money either.

Why would they have done that? After all, it was a left-wing government and its prime minister, who took it upon himself to close Catholic schools, support LGBTQ activists and illegal migration, such a prime minister cannot be a bad person, at least from the point of view of Brussels.

And then it would have been embarrassing to pursue the case further, because in the meantime it also became public that in the background the EU officials were eating the caviar with a big spoon. The Azeris wanted to score good points in Brussels, and the best place for this was the EU member Malta, through which they could get closer to the EU bureaucracy, this was called caviar diplomacy. Now, how could it have been possible to act harshly against the Maltese government, if many European leaders had eaten the exceptionally delicious caviar from the hands of the Azeris through the mediation of La Vallette.

For example, Karin Strenz, the representative of the German CDU in the Council of Europe, who also held the position of faction leader of the People's Party, pocketed a total of two million euros in order to, among other things, vote against the release of Azeri political prisoners in Strasbourg. And many people in Malta knew a lot.

And then the EU was busy with something else. Regarding the Maltese murder case, American journalist Rachel Donadio was interested in the EU's position on the rule of law, so she contacted Sophie In't'Velda, who was the Dutch member of the EP's investigative committee on Poland. The representative admitted that Europe is still looking for a way to map the situation of the rule of law in each country, adding that Poland causes them the biggest problem.

And then a key sentence is uttered that sheds light on the EU's attitude to the murder in Malta and to the rule of law in general. "Mechanisms are invented on the fly".

We are there!

Péter G. Fehér, senior employee of Magyar Hírlap

Featured image: Times of Malta