A man has asked the Justice Minister to order an investigation into a Gozo court marshal’s delay in delivering a notification to his estranged wife, which he says created an obstacle to making contact with his daughter.

The Gozitan man is claiming that the delay may constitute collusion between the court marshal and the woman’s lawyer during separation proceedings before the Gozo Family Court.

He claims the magistrate’s important decree took the marshal 12 days to deliver over Christmas, with the excuse that the lawyer, who was meant to reply within the stipulated two-day time frame, was abroad.

The couple’s four-year-old – as in all separation cases where children are involved – is caught up in the middle of the wrangle.

The family’s names are being withheld to protect her identity.

His wife was doing all she could to exclude him from his daughter’s life. So he filed an urgent application asking the magistrate to order his wife to allow daily 10-minute telephone conversations with his daughter until the next hearing

The man told Justice Minister Owen Bonnici in his letter that his wife was doing all she could to exclude him from his daughter’s life. So he filed an urgent application before the Gozo Court asking the magistrate to order his wife to allow daily 10-minute telephone conversations with his daughter until the next hearing.

The magistrate took note of the application and ordered the opposing party to file a reply within two days from notification. The document, which had to be hand-delivered immediately by the court marshal to the wife and her lawyer, reached the marshal on the morning of December 23.

The marshal told the man he had tried to deliver the court decree to the woman that same morning but no one answered the door. The man said according to his daughter, she and her mother were at home all morning and the doorbell had not rung. He contacted the marshal again, who this time told him that it was Christmas and he would deliver it afterwards.

On Boxing Day, the marshal told the man that he had not managed to deliver the documents because the woman’s lawyer was abroad. He added that there was no other lawyer who could draft the reply within the two days as ordered by the magistrate.

On December 30, the marshal told the man that he had not made another attempt to deliver the documents, which were eventually delivered on January 3 upon the lawyer’s return to work and 12 days after the magistrate issued his decree.

The man asked Dr Bonnici to order an independent inquiry into the unusually long time it had taken for the other party to be notified of an urgent legal application. He also asked for the inquiry to investigate how the marshal in question had taken discretionary decisions to delay the delivery of the documents, as well as the marshal’s closeness to the lawyer in question and the composition of his office.

“The sequence of events and information at hand raises suspicions of collusion between [the lawyer] and [the court marshal] in order to delay the delivery of the notification. Irrespective of any of this, [the court marshal] is not meant to get involved in the merits of cases in any way or to exercise any discretion in the timing of delivery of notifications in the course of his work,” the man told the Justice Minister.