Magistrate hits back at minister, criticises colleague

A magistrate has broken the code of silence usually adhered to by the judiciary to launch a scathing attack on the justice minister, a former colleague and the Commission for the Administration of Justice over recently-published statistics which show an alarming backlog of pending inquiries.

Magistrate Giovanni Grixti, who was appointed in 1996, says in a lengthy letter published today in The Sunday Times (see page 19) that most of the 231 cases attributed to him were inherited last year from former Magistrate Joseph Cassar, whose files, he adds, were kept in "a very disorganised fashion".

The angry letter comes in response to official statistics from the Justice Ministry published in this newspaper last Sunday.

The data showed that there were 1,769 pending magisterial inquiries in Malta and 300 in Gozo as of last May. Joseph Apap Bologna, Michael Mallia and Giovanni Grixti placed in the top three with 381, 339 and 231 pending inquiries respectively.

However, Dr Grixti says in his letter that he inherited 219 of them from Dr Cassar and added that Justice Minister Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici should check his facts before going public on such matters.

"My average backlog of inquires invariably stands at 30 and never dating more than two years."

When contacted, a spokesman for the minister said he was taking note of the magistrate's comments but pointed out that the ministry had merely replied to questions from the media.

"This was in no way a name-and-shame exercise, as the magistrate is making it out to be, but merely providing data that were already publicly available, and secondly an account of what the minister was doing to address the untenable situation of pending magisterial inquiries."

In fact, in an interview with The Sunday Times today (see pages 11,12), the minister is proposing to overhaul the current inquiry system.

But the magistrate's letter also opens a breach with his former colleague whose filing methods he at one stage describes as "shameful".

Since the files were kept without any sort of register, Dr Grixti complains, his staff had to go through the entire lot to bring them up to date. More significantly, he says that some of the inquiries were not even known to the administration.

"It would be interesting to learn why the minister has woken up to what he claims to be an untenable situation when he has been aware of such figures for many years," he adds, pointing out that case statistics - as the ministry itself said - are handed over to the court's administration at the end of every month.

But Dr Grixti's criticism does not stop at the minister or the court's administration. He asks what the Commission for the Administration of Justice, aware of all pending cases, did to bring to account whoever was responsible for the backlog which landed in his lap.

Dr Grixti also criticises the "administration" for refusing to approve overtime to his inundated staff to deal with the backlog. Clearly upset by the story, he ends his letter with a dramatic parting shot: "At the same time I wish to thank the minister for helping me realise that it does me no good to strive to conclude cases at the expense of my family and my health, spending weekends and nights working on my caseload only to be unjustly judged by people who should have known better."

Attempts to contact Dr Cassar yesterday were unsuccessful.