Mintoff challenges award at European Court

Former Prime Minister Dom Mintoff has complained to the European Court of Human Rights that the Lm360,000 compensation awarded to him for the de facto expropriation of his home at Delimara was "a long way from any form of appropriate recognition of the violations suffered".

Mr Mintoff and his two daughters Anna McKenna and Yana Joan Mintoff Bland filed an application in the Strasbourg court against the government.

In their application they recalled that, in 1987, the need was felt to build a new power station and the government selected and expropriated a site in Delimara that was less than 15 feet away from Mr Mintoff's property. Mr Mintoff objected to the proposed power station and also proposed a number of alternative locations but to no avail.

When the power plant started operating, in 1992, the pollution emitted made it impossible for Mr Mintoff and his family to continue living in their property and so they moved to another residence in Tarxien.

The abandonment of the Delimara property made it vulnerable to break-ins and Mr Mintoff had to find a place where to store the furniture held there, according to the application.

Mr Mintoff took his case to court and, in a judgement handed down in April 1996, the Constitutional Court ruled that the Mintoff family had suffered and continued to suffer from a violation of their rights. The court sent the case to the First Hall of the Civil Court (in its constitutional jurisdiction) to liquidate the damages and give the parties time to reach an amicable solution.

But no solution was reached and, in August 2004, the First Hall liquidated the damages at Lm360,000. The judgement was based on the following criteria: the intrinsic value of the property based on a valuation of the property in 1992 before the power station was built; the fact that the government had evaluated the property at Lm220,000 in 1997; the property was to remain in the possession of the Mintoffs.

In July 2006, the Constitutional Court (an appellate court) confirmed the award of the First Hall but ordered that the legal costs for the liquidation of compensation should be shared by all parties.

Meanwhile, while the constitutional proceedings were ongoing, the water and electricity supply to Mr Mintoff's Tarxien residence was cut. This was because he refused to pay a bill, of just over Lm800, claiming he was owed Lm360,000 by the government. When the supply was restored, because the bills were paid by a third party, the water was supplied too suddenly and the pipes burst because of the water pressure. "It thus resulted that Mr Mintoff's only alternate residence to which he had moved in consequence of the impossibility of using his Delimara residence came to be rendered uninhabitable," the application said.

Last month, Mr Mintoff and his two daughters took their case to the European Court of Human Rights claiming that the Maltese Constitutional Court failed to provide a remedy equivalent to the violation as established by the same court.

They noted that the Constitutional Court had established that they had suffered a breach of their fundamental rights by the de facto expropriation of property. But, on awarding compensation, the court had ignored a number of crucial aspects.

To start with, they claimed, there was "the sheer indignity" suffered by Mr Mintoff who, apart from having an enormous influence in the development of the Maltese Republic, was a 90-year-old man who suffered from a number of illnesses.

"The actions of the public authorities have effectively hounded out this man from his chosen resting place of residence, (L-Gharix, in Delimara) which had been built specifically close to the sea where he would indulge in swimming daily, to a house in one of the more populated areas of Malta," the Mintoffs claimed.

They maintained they were discriminated against when the director of Lands had accepted to value property adjacent to the Delimara property at 1997 prices rather than 1992 prices.

They also noted, among other things, that the court had failed to award interest from the day the expropriation took place and that the decision to share the cost of the proceedings did not tally with the court's decision.

They concluded by noting that the object of their application was to seek a declaration that the Maltese courts had failed to provide them with an adequate and effective remedy, and to seek a declaration that their rights to an effective remedy and to the prohibition of discrimination had been breached.

They also sought the liquidation of compensation that covered the loss suffered, the hardship and excessive burden they had been made to suffer and the costs and expenses incurred by them in both the domestic proceedings and the current ones.

Lawyers Ian Refalo and John Vassallo signed the application.