In the telling editorial The Justice Debate (June 23), The Sunday Times of Malta wondered if “judges, magistrates and lawyers” would permit reforming a byzantine court system. “Proceedings which should be over in weeks are dragged out over many years” and 16,000 criminal cases have been pending for at least 10 years.

One wonders if this is merely a question of mentality and disposition, putty in the hands of certain lawyers, or if it is not more structural and systemic.

Once a sentence has been confirmed on appeal, do you just start all over again?

While one understands that pika is a core value, particularly in certain village-rooted localities, and that lawyers live off their clients, should not some deterrent or disciplinary modality apply when one purports to initiate just about the same case after all remedies have been exhausted? Is the ne bis in idem principle dispensable or are infinite twists and turns to it permissable?

It is, to put it mildly, disconcerting to find out that, after 16 years of litigation (kawża rivendikatorja and all) a guaranteed title of absolute ownership on a contract of sale in a land registration area was perfectly valid in the first place after all, the right to any objection having long been time-barred by law. Mercifully, attempts have also been in hand to limit the planning authority’s right to interfere in minimal internal changes to one’s own private property.

Another matter awaiting resolution is the right of ownership in lease, which may have remained dubious, especially since 1979, increasingly straining ‘tenant’ pretensions vis-à-vis basic European norms once the lease expires.

And what customer care service are the police equipped to provide in reports of, say, ‘anonymous’ written threats following the outcome of a court case, or otherwise? Would some feedback to the victim, reassuring or otherwise, not be in order after some weeks or months? What became of the police headquarters’ PR office, which was so excellently staffed for a short while?

Rightly, and finally, the whole law-citizen relationship would seem to be increasingly under the microscope. Surely this is not simply a question of ‘bureaucracy’. It also reflects on modernity, organisation, decisiveness, equanimity and ethics.