I was quite surprised on reading the front page article in last Sunday’s edition dealing with the case of Żurrieq major Ignatius Grixti.

It is not my intention to comment on the merits of the case, but having served for almost 15 years on the bench, I realised how fast procedures and values are changing.

It is reported that following a judgment delivered by a Superior Criminal Appeals Court “two internal inquiries had been carried out: one by the Office of the Chief Justice, which investigated the judge, and the Law Courts’ director general, who focused on actions of the staff assigned to the judge”.

It is difficult to understand how the consequences of a judgment can be subjected to two inquiries; “details about the outcome of the two inquiries” were not given but it is presumed that the “judgments” reached in these inquiries were transmitted to all the parties concerned.

One can somehow understand an inquiry carried out by the Chief Justice himself, but I fail to understand how the Law Courts’ director general got involved in the matter.

Another curious “conclusion” states that “an internal inquiry found the error was entirely his own, as he wrote the judgment in its entirety”.

I was not sure whether to cry or laugh; doubt is being thrown on whether the judgments delivered are written (or typed) by the judge or by some other individual. I refuse to believe we have reached such a low valuation of judgments delivered by our courts, in this case the highest criminal jurisdiction in our country. According to our cherished Constitution, the judiciary is answerable only to Parliament and to the Commission for the Administration of Justice and to no one else.

We always believed that our judges are fully responsible for the contents of their decisions, which according to our Code of Civil Procedure are to be read out in open court, which also means that, while completely exonerating all their staff, our judges and magistrates shoulder all responsibility for the contents of their delivered judgments.