The two major political parties have, for decades, used the requisition of property owned by private individuals for infrastructural and social causes (occasionally, especially in the 1970s and early 1980s, in a blatantly illegal manner too). Correct use of the requisition order is considered to be normal practice but the way the owners of requisitioned property are compensated is often blatantly unfair and even unjust.
The European Court of Human Rights criticised both the government and the Constitutional Court about their inability to remedy an unfair situation relating to two particular requisition cases that go back a few decades.
In the first case, a privately owned property in Gżira was occupied by a tenant in the 1970s. The government issued a requisition order in 1976 to protect the tenant from being evicted. In 1988, another requisition order was issued on the same property even if a new occupier was now living there. The new occupier was also granted a development permit to carry out alterations on the property.
The other case involved a person who allegedly broke into a house in Rabat in 1987 and settled there. Just before the 1987 election, the house had been requisitioned and the place assigned to the person who had broken in. The requisition order was renewed in June 1988.
After taking their cases to the local courts, including the Constitutional Court, the aggrieved owners resorted to the ECHR. With regard to the Gżira property case, the ECHR was evidently unsatisfied that the Maltese court’s award to the owner “only covered non-pecuniary damage”. In fact, it said: “If that is so – as appear likely – the applicant is still the victim of the said violation, which has not been redressed given the absence of any redress in the form of an award for the pecuniary losses suffered by the applicant.”
Moreover, the Court in Strasbourg felt that the award could hardly be considered sufficient in the light of the expert’s valuations. The ECHR rapped the local court and the government even more severely when it stated that even after the Constitutional Court’s judgment, “the applicant remained subject to the same laws that breached his rights as the Constitutional Court did not take any action in that respect”.
Such comments confirm what many have been arguing for many years: the requisition of property process has, at best, been unfair to property owners and, at worst, it has been used abusively.
The two cases highlighted here confirm that justice delayed is justice denied and that the Maltese courts have a grave responsibility to ensure they act in time to prevent injustices being inflicted on ordinary people under the pretext of the exercise of the government’s right to requisition privately-owned land in the national interest.
In the second case, the ECHR stressed that the burden on the owners of the private property imposed by a requisition order was disproportionate and excessive, adding that “they were made to bear most of the social and financial cost of social accommodation”.
Governments are expected to provide social housing for those who are destitute or cannot provide accommodation for themselves and their families. However, this burden should not be shouldered unfairly by private owners who have a fundamental right to enjoy their property. After decades of unfair administrative inertia, the solution to these sad cases would be one that sees the government and the owners involved reaching agreement on a fair compensation.