From the
research conducted it appears that Maltese jurisprudence on the matter of
obscene publications (artistic or literary publications in particular) is very
scarce. This could be due, in part, to the rigorous censorial activities of the
postal censors and customs officers which had the power to examine and withhold
books and other imported materials deemed to be objectionable and prohibited by
the laws of Malta.
For
instance, one could point to Article 24 of the Post Office law (1924) which
stated:
‘No person shall send by post any indecent or obscene print, picture, pictograph, lithograph, engraving, book, card, or any other indecent, obscene or impious article, or any postal article having thereon or on the cover thereof, any words, marks or designs of an indecent, obscene, seditious, scurrilous, threatening, or grossly offensive character...’
Article 60
(b) of the Customs Ordinance (1909) was also cited as grounds for restricting
imported books. It established as an offence ‘any prohibited goods whatsoever
which are imported or brought into any part of Malta’.
With regards
to literature in particular, it is suggested by some that such officers went so
far as to base their decisions on the infamous Index Librorum Prohibitorum. This was especially prevalent up to the 1960s which was characterised by
religious dogma and repressive spiritual sanctions by the local Curia during
the turbulent political history of that period in Malta.
Such facts
can be attested by various articles and letters of complaint published in local
newspapers. In 1964 alone, 1014 books and 557 other publications were withheld
by the Postal and Printed Matter Board of Censors. Several classics such as Fanny Hill
by John Cleland, Lady Chatterly’s Lover by
D. H. Lawrence and La Romana by
Alberto Moravia where nowhere to be seen on the Maltese book-shelves, including
works by famous writers and thinkers such as Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and
Havelock Ellis. Moreover,
no appeal to the ordinary courts was permissible from the final decisions of
the Customs Printed Matter Appeals Board.
Censorship was
also prevalent in film and stage productions. In one letter to the editor of
the Times of Malta, Dr. Benny Camilleri laments that ‘[t]he censors have been
so severe to most of the good films being produced today that we are in the
position of having to go to London or Rome in order to be able to see a good
film.’ In 1964, Lino Cassar writes in Il-Helsien,
that the censors withheld 15 films and made cuts to another 74. In 1969, 24 films were banned and another 40 in 1970. In 1963 the theatre censors banned the plays Sei Personaggi in Cerca d’Autore and L’Uomo, La Bestia e La Virtu by Luigi Pirandello leading various
commentators to ask ‘[h]ow long are we going to suffer at the hands of these
people who cannot tell the difference between pornography and art?’
So ingrained
and deeply rooted was the state of censorship that a certain ‘A.A.M’ writing to
the Sunday Times of Malta proclaimed that ‘[w]e have come to accept the censor
as an institution that constitutes an intimate part of the normal State
machinery. We have conjectured, accepted and cited repeatedly “valid reasons”
to institute and expand the censor’s ramifications’.
In its few judgments on the subject, the influence of the
court also had a role to play. In Il-Pulizija vs Domenico Catalogna (Court of Criminal Appeal (Inferior), 30 January 1954 (Vol XXXVIII (1954), Part 4, Page 798)), for
instance, the defendant was convicted for an offence to public morals for
inadvertently showing nudist paintings to his friends in public. In its
judgment the Court of Criminal Appeal quoted the Italian jurist Cocurullo who
argued that art should have no business in displaying the vice and depravity
found in nature and society; it should not lift that veil. In the slighlty more bizarre judgment of Il-Pulizija vs Anthony Deguara (Court of Criminal Appeal (Inferior), 26 November 1960), the accused was convicted for an offense to public morals for playing the song
‘Nuda’ by Domenico Modugno on a jukebox in a cafeteria in Sliema. In its
judgment the court of criminal appeal held that the words ‘jew b’xi mod ieħor
mhux imsemmi band’oħra f’dan il-Kodiċi, joffendi l-morali, l-imġieba xierqa,
jew id-diċenza’ (in what was then Article 352(z) of the Criminal Code) was comprehensive
enough to proscribe any behaviour which in some way offends morals and concluded
that the fact that such a song was played on a jukebox in a public place
undoubtedly offends public morals.
In light of these historical realities, Maltese artists and
writers rarely dared to challenge the status-quo. Art, for the most part, had
to be timid, aesthetically pleasing and inoffensive to pass the censor’s test.
Anything sexual was always taboo. The fear of criminal punishment or the
censor’s ban and the lack of appeal from decisions of the censors, whilst
unfortunate in themselves, necessarily lead to a scarcity of local jurisprudence
on this matter.
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