Online legal notices

The Director of Information, Mr Emanuel Abela, said that legal notices published since January 2003 have been available online (The Sunday Times, January 8).

I must congratulate the director for providing such an indispensable service to the public and more so to us advocates, given that in the past few years, this mode of legislation has been adopted largely to transpose EU legislation into Maltese law, resulting in the adoption of a mass of legislation. Suffice it to say that over 400 legal notices were published just last year and over 500 in 2004.

However, I wish to suggest that a search function be introduced as this would greatly facilitate our work: rather than scrolling through a never-ending list of notices, one would be able to source a particular notice immediately. Such a function would be even more useful to members of the public to whom only one particular legal notice would be of interest.

Such a measure would go a long way towards making this particular service more user-friendly.