The Divorce Movement said today that the Prime Minister was unfair yesterday when he implied that legislation proposed by Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando and Evarist Bartolo was not the serious way how laws were enacted, and more reflection and research was needed.

In a statement, the movement said the proposed legislation moved by the two MPs, updating the original bill by Dr Pullicino Orlando, stemmed from reflection and discussion within the movement. Their proposed legislation provided for a responsible divorce mechanism which included protection for the spouses and their children.

This legislation removed existing discrimination where divorce of Maltese given abroad was recognised, but the Maltese could not get divorce in their own country.

The new bill, the movement said, continued to be based on Irish divorce law, which was the most conservative in the world, and people who applied for divorce therefore had to be separated for four years out of the last five and the marriage had to be shown to have irretrievably broken down.

The amendments proposed earlier this week made the proposed legislation more relevant for Malta. It was normal that original bills were amended.

The movement said the prime minister was right to argue that decisions such as that on divorce should not be taken on the basis of what went on in other countries. This, the movement said, was never the basis for its call for divorce.

It insisted that divorce was only the recognition of the fact that a marriage would have irretrievably broken down and could not continue to be called a marriage.

The movement said it agreed that there should be more studies on how marriages could survive. But there was no doubt that some marriages would continue to fail. Studies such as that by Discern, which projected 35,000 separated persons by 2015, could not be ignored.

See also

http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20101216/local/pm-insists-on-data-for-divorce-debate