The Land Department has been in the news recently for all the wrong reasons. The sorry case of the still unapprehended perpetrator of an illegally-built road at Comino rumbles on.
But in a near-farcical gesture of buck-passing, Mepa, whose dedication to the enforcement of the law hovers somewhere between weak to non-existent, placed an injunction on the Commissioner for Land – a department which it now turns out is Mepa’s equal at not enforcing its rules and regulations – on the grounds that he is responsible for the public land and “no permission was sought from Mepa”.
The two organisations are no doubt now engaged in a bureaucratic cat-fight over their respective responsibilities while, meanwhile, the business of catching the culprits who committed an environmental crime on the island remains unattended. The Police Force – also a body that enforces the law – remains mute.
What is it about Malta’s enforcement authorities that makes them so reluctant to uphold the law? In the five years between 2008 and 2012, the Land Department carried out several hundred inspections of government land and applied the law to remove those contravening it, averaging about 170 evictions annually.
In 2013, following the election of the Labour government, there were 25 enforcement actions and, so far this year, there have been only six.
In the period 2008-2012, there were sometimes more evictions in one month than in the whole of a year now.
What has changed? Are the Maltese suddenly so respectful of publicly-owned land that they no longer seek to circumvent the law?
Given our experience with the notorious boathouse encroachments, where public land has been stolen on an industrial scale with the connivance of both Nationalist and Labour governments, that seems highly unlikely.
The Office of the Prime Minister has admitted as much. It declared that “the current direction of the department is to try to achieve as much as possible [through] voluntary compliance as this would save a lot in terms of human and financial resources”.
Given the drastic drop in evictions carried out since 2013, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that there has been a deliberate change of policy which seeks to placate a particular section of the population. In the face of the country’s experience with illegal squatters in boathouses all over the island, it is clearly a policy of appeasement that simply does not work. Indeed, it is a recipe for more loss of public land to those who have no right to it.
Where public land is concerned, flouting the law is endemic. The Land Department is charged with protecting public land. It is a common resource. Public land is held in trust by the government of the day to ensure it is used well for the common good and not abused by those who have no right to it.
For enforcement to work effectively, three key ingredients must be present. First, there must be the political will to implement it. By its actions, the Land Department is clearly failing that test. Secondly, there must be a sufficient number of enforcement officers deployed to fulfil the task. Thirdly, the law courts must ensure the administration of justice reflects the seriousness of the offence.
But, clearly, if the case does not reach the law courts because the Land Department appears to be lax in enforcing evictions, the whole system of enforcement is undermined. The department’s current policy is in need of urgent revision if public land is in future to be properly protected.