Mark Borg’s speech starts at 1:34

An 18-year-old law student addressed last night’s vigil for Daphne Caruana Galizia with a call for the public to reject what he described as “the new normal” introduced by Prime Minister Joseph Muscat.

“We are fighting for our fundamental human rights, meaning the rights of all individuals of Malta, whether they agree with us or not, whether they’ll assault us or not,” Mark Borg said. “We’re here to reject the new normal founded in the golden years of Joseph Muscat’s government, where crooks became statesmen, where flowers and candles became provocation, where free became oppressed, where murder became trivial, where right became wrong and where evil became good.”

Borg said that Muscat’s silence in the face of threats and harassment faced by Caruana Galizia throughout her lifetime bore shades of dehumanisation campaigns in China and Russia.

“In Daphne’s own words, a political party that is prepared to attack a journalist to achieve its own ends will think nothing of doing the same to other journalists when they become inconvenient too,” he said. “This is the reality we’re living in, a reality where MPs, MEPs, activists and anyone who dares criticise the government are attacked by the government’s propaganda machine, dehumanised, framed as traitors, beaten up, and, in the case of foreigners, told to go back to their country.”

“We want nothing more than to live in a normal democracy where you aren’t marked as being depressed or, in sexist terms, a depressed housewife for criticising the government, where you can exercise your freedom of speech without fear that you’ll lose our job, be sued unfairly or have political parties in government or Opposition systematically lash out at you.”

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Tim Diacono

Tim is interested in the rapid evolution of human society and is passionate about justice, human rights and cutting-edge political debates. You can follow him on Instagram or Twitter/X at @timdiacono or reach out to him at [email protected]