Chief Justice Silvio Camilleri said in his welcome address to the newly appointed President of Malta that “the judiciary is the public’s favourite punching bag, but they have to realise that the lengthy delays and certain decisions are often the result of the constraints of the law”.
While appreciating the Chief Justice’s role as the judiciary’s shop steward, he might on reflection be prepared to admit that he was being a bit disingenuous in blaming “constraints of the law” for our abysmal justice system. A deeper assessment might have led him to say, frankly, that Malta’s system of justice is creaking, if not in some areas broken.
Last year, the European Commission expressed concern at the Maltese justice system. What was shocking was the scale and depth of Malta’s performance across so many fronts compared with the systems in other countries. Malta was bottom, by some distance, on the time it takes for non-criminal cases to be resolved when it came to dealing with administrative cases, as well as litigious civil and commercial cases. The lack of resources devoted to justice in Malta was also highlighted, with Malta ranking in the bottom six on expenditure going on the law courts.
At about the same time, a report by the government’s Efficiency Unit (MEU) found that almost half of about 16,000 criminal cases yet to be decided had been pending for 10 years or more. Criminal cases take on average about nine years each to be decided including the appeal stage. Civil cases take almost four years. It surely cannot be the case that this backlog is caused solely or even overwhelmingly by “constraints of the law”.
The man in the street, who is at the receiving end of this system, has to devote an average of five per cent of his annual vacation leave to spend time in court coping with this notoriously inefficient system. This perhaps is where the Chief Justice should have trained his fire.
Moreover, in the area falling directly under him, the last few years have brought to the fore increasing concerns about the quality of some of our judges and magistrates. Coming on top of some shocking instances of judicial corruption, these cases have raised crucial questions about the selection of our judges and magistrates, the procedure for removing bad apples and the whole business of how the judiciary should be held to account.
The problems of the administration of justice in Malta are deep-rooted. With every report that is published, new light is shed on a system which is not working as it should. The administration of the law courts, the unconscionable length of time it takes for cases to be decided, the quality of the judiciary and the magistracy, all point to a system that is in dire need of attention, which the new Labour administration, to its credit, is attempting to tackle.
A more balanced assessment by the Chief Justice to the President might have been to admit that treating the citizen in our law courts in a shabby manner is an indictment both of legislators for failing to pass the right laws and the judiciary and the legal profession who appear to have connived at a system which has penalised the very people they were meant to serve.
He might also have gone further to state the judiciary’s determination to cooperate fully and constructively with the Justice Reform Commission’s proposals which are now in the process of being implemented.