[attach id=255335 size="medium"]Franco Debono is one of three lawyers who have complained to the European Court of Human Rights.[/attach]

Three lawyers have complained to the European Court of Human Rights about inconsistencies in judgments handed down by the Constitutional Court.

David Camilleri, Joseph Gatt and Franco Debono, a former Nationalist MP who was appointed Law Commissioner by the Labour Government, focused on a long-standing issue about a suspect’s right to a lawyer during interrogation by the police.

They said that their client, Martin Dimech, was awaiting trial on drug trafficking charges.

He was claiming breach of human rights on the ground that he did not have legal assistance during police investigations. The claim was upheld.

The Attorney General appealed and the Constitutional Court overturned the ruling, the lawyers told the European Court.

They argued that “diametrically opposed reasoning” in many conflicting judgments ran counter to the principle of legal certainty, which was at the very heart of the provisions of the European Human Rights Convention.

“The Constitutional Court, being the supreme court of Malta, should have continued establishing a linear interpretation rather than becoming itself the actual source of legal uncertainty. It is the duty of the supreme court of a State to resolve legal conflicts,” they noted in their application.

Furthermore, “the lack of consistency on the part of the judicial organ which is, in actual fact, endowed with protecting the fundamental human rights of the applicant is a form of the highest violation”.

The lawyers said that “once the Constitutional Court had enshrined the principle that the lack of legal assistance during an interrogation was a violation of the right of fair hearing, then it should not have elected to diverge completely from such reasoning, merely on subjective grounds”.