The European Commission has expressed displeasure at the Maltese justice system. The EU’s “Justice Scoreboard”, which ranks member states on a number of criteria affecting the administration of justice, found that Malta was bottom by some distance in the length of time it takes for non-criminal court cases to be resolved.

Malta’s system of justice has been creaking for decades. The backlog of cases in the courts is such that it would take several years to clear even if no new cases were filed tomorrow. It is a cliché, but true. Justice delayed is justice denied.

But relief may be at hand. The Minister for Justice, Owen Bonnici, who has been on a well-merited and well executed mission to reform the law courts, has announced that an experiment to reduce the number of “no-shows” (in which people failing to turn up at court lead to cases being put off by magistrates to a later date) had led to a considerable reduction over a six-month period.

As a result, the magistrate concerned in the pilot project had been able to handle 861 cases, of which 666 fell under the new system, thus leading to an impressive rate of completion.

This system will now be extended to another magistrate’s hall dealing with family cases of a minor criminal nature, with the aim in due course being to extend the system throughout the Magistrates’ Court.

While welcoming the success of this pilot project (involving the use of a private company, instead of the police) the question must be asked why it cannot be introduced more widely, more quickly. Is it for lack of resources, or is there resistance in judicial and legal quarters from a notoriously conservative professional body which is famously resistant to change?

The Minister for Justice is clearly determined to implement the findings of the imaginative report led by Judge Giovanni Bonello’s Commission for the Reform of the Justice System. But the pace is still slow.

Part of the reason may lie with the size of the judiciary. Malta, which has an impressive 290 lawyers to every 100,000 inhabitants, has only nine judges per 100,000 people – proportionally smaller than any other member state in the EU. The lack of resources devoted to justice in Malta is also poor.

This may partly explain the slowness in implementing change. The focus so far appears to have been on implementing low-cost improvements.

For example, the Minister has announced sensible plans to allow magistrates passing sentence on people to do so regardless of whether or not they attend a sitting.

While this and other such practical improvements are sensible in themselves, there must come a time soon when the nettle of adequate pay and pensions for the judiciary and the provision of proper administrative manpower support and systems in the courts must be grasped.

The administration of justice in Malta has needed fixing for several years. It is an indictment on successive governments, as well as 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.

Previous administrations have lacked the political will to tackle many of the vested interests at stake, as well as, importantly, the practical imagination and means to modernise and change the way the justice system operates. We may at last be seeing the start of a turnaround but there is still a very long way to go.