Back-bencher Franco Debono said yesterday that 704 or 25 per cent of the 2,994 accused people had availed themselves of the right to have access to a lawyer at the time of investigation.

Speaking during the budget debate on the financial estimates of the Justice and Home Affairs Ministry, Dr Debono said this was not something to be belittled.

He therefore had not expected to see such ministerial in The Times of July 21 and 22. One had given the impression of a tacit agreement between the government and the opposition not to install the right to a lawyer – something the opposition had denied – and the other was tantamount to saying that the change had had very little effect.

Dr Debono said none of his public statements must be taken as a personal attack on the incumbent Minister Carm Mifsud Bonnici, for whom he had great respect. He was just doing his job as a lawyer and a politician.

But Malta was indeed the only EU member state where justice and home affairs were lumped in the same ministry.

The current system of a magistrate inquiring with the police and later in the same day deciding on police prosecutions was indeed shocking.

He was happy to see that some of his own suggestions had been incorporated in the Bill of amendments which the minister had recently launched.

It was easy to raise fines on drugs, but what must be focused on was the potential spread of disease. He agreed with the system of first-time warnings, adding that it was a step beyond the conditional discharge.

Dr Debono was in agreement with opposition spokesman on justice José Herrera that lawyers were currently facing more fellow lawyers chairing tribunals than members of the judiciary.

He was against the Attorney General’s discretion on how to proceed against drug offenders. At least he must be bound to give a reason for his decision. The AG’s role in the judicial system must be extensively redefined.

Court-appointed experts must be real experts, even in translation.

Winding up the debate, Dr Mifsud Bonnici spoke of his ministry’s long-term vision for the police corps and law enforcement, including greatly enhanced training against criminality, increased capital expenditure and, on the other hand, a very stable level of criminality that made Malta safer than many other countries.

He said there should be a higher level of bipartisan agreement between government and opposition on the police corps. He announced that the corps’ complement had gone from 1,786 in 1998 to 1,931 at the end of October 2011.

Dr Mifsud Bonnici said the government intended to follow up the recent agreement on the setting up of a police trade union with similar agreements on the Department of Civil Protection and the prison wardens corps.

He said that without the 1,926 reported cases of theft of mobile phones the crime rate this year would have been lower. But even so, the nature of crimes in Malta was not generally as serious as overseas. The rate moved higher in peak tourism periods, such as in pick-pocketing.

The value of stolen property had dropped from €6.8 million in 2007 to the current €4.4 million.

Training of corps members at the Police Academy had totalled 27,200 people, which meant that many had attended multiple courses on how to counter criminality. For the last three consecutive years recruits had been given longer training courses.

The increased capital expenditure on the police corps this year and next included the acquisition of more sophisticated vehicles for the mobile squad, video cameras for use during suspects’ interrogation, and segways, which on trial had given the police in Valletta much greater mobility.

Dr Mifsud Bonnici said that besides more widespread and meaningful education to prison inmates, the drug rehabilitation service had made huge steps forward with help from Appoġġ and Sedqa agencies.

He was pleased with the perceived new recognition of the benefits of reparative justice, on which he spoke extensively. There was a new remissions board to impose conditions, as well as a new prison department of probational parole and the risk assessment thereof. To date, inmates had given 1,380 hours of community work.

Regarding the Law Courts, he said all statistics pointed to greater uptakes of the facilities on offer, with up to 5,200 executive legal letters, a total of 3,000 referrals to arbitration and close to 12,000 new cases for public access to justice. In spite of this, the number of sentences handed down had increased and many cases were taking less than three years to resolve.

In Gozo, too, the backlog of cases was receding after the appointment of another judge to hear civil cases.

Dr Mifsud Bonnici rebutted the perception of a lack of investment at the courts and of un-preparedness of the Family Court for divorce cases, with pro-divorce campaigner Dr Deborah Schembri being on record as saying this was not the case.

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