In a letter to this newspaper, Lawrence Mizzi assumes that a referendum will be required to make divorce "legal in Malta". It is a false assumption. Divorce is already legal in Malta. The 1975 Marriage Act introduced the concept of divorce into the Maltese legal framework. Before that time, chaos reigned in our courts with divorcees being prosecuted for bigamy when they remarried.
Our laws and our courts for the past 33 years have recognised divorces obtained abroad, including divorces from marriages celebrated in Malta, between Maltese citizens and also those celebrated by religious rite. Divorce cannot be legally introduced in Malta today because it has been around for over three decades.
The government, having a majority in Parliament, is under no constitutional obligation to refer to the people when extending the right to remarry to persons domiciled in Malta. However, Mr Mizzi is right in noting that the PN gave no hint of being in favour of change in its electoral manifesto and could be under a political, not a legal, obligation to have the matter decided by popular vote. That would be the epitome of Maltese political weirdness: a government proposing legislation it has opposed for decades and obliged to fight a referendum contradicting its lately-abandoned stance. My guess is that the government would seek to avoid anything so messy.
While the divorce we are talking about in Malta is simply the right to remarry after a separation, all statistics referring to other jurisdictions combine the two, separation and the right to remarry.
It is deliberate deception to attribute all the ills noted in statistics to the right to remarry (divorce) alone. We already have all the ills, pain and suffering that arise from the trauma of a separation. Which statistics quantify additional damage done by remarriage? How are these compared to the uniquely Maltese phenomenon of cohabitation constrained by the restriction of the right to remarry?
It is also highly deceptive to present divorce or the right to remarry following a separation as the only cause of trauma to children. Children cannot tell the difference between separation and divorce nor can they tell the difference between the cohabitation of one or both of their parents and their remarriage. The harm done to children cannot be denied. It has not been prevented by preventing remarriage.
In each case, the effects on children are different just as the process of separation is different depending on the circumstances and character of the parents, their sensitivity towards their children and their insight into the effects of their own conduct upon them. None of this will change in any way with the extension of the right to remarry following a separation.
Mr Mizzi appears to fear that extending the right to remarry would undermine the family, encourage marital infidelity and cohabitation as well as lead young people to choose to cohabit rather than marry because marriage will have become dissoluble. Apart from the fact that a Maltese marriage has been dissoluble for 33 years already, my guess is that all the above has already happened without the extension of the right to remarry and perhaps because of the failure to extend the right to remarry.
If divorce had been fully introduced in 1975, and not only the recognition of divorces obtained abroad, many second unions would now be marriages and not cohabitations.
The experience of cohabitation would not be as widespread or as widely accepted as it is. If this is a harm to the institution of marriage and to society, in many cases it has been made inevitable by the restriction of the right to remarry.
Would the extension of the right to remarry following a separation lead to more separations? Are there thousands of us who do not leave our spouses only because we would not be able to remarry? What sort of marriages would these be? Few or many, does their possible existence and their despicable continuation justify the denial of the right to remarry to those who would choose to do so?
The dividing line between those for and against change on this issue has begun to gel on a matter of attitude: of those who view their peers as a squirming mass of unintelligent appetites whom they feel entitled to patronise and of those who want to treat their peers as they would like to be treated themselves, as intelligent and responsible citizens.
The effective denial by the state of the right to remarry is, in fact, a violent, unnatural and unjustified intrusion in our personal and intimate relationships. It is high time that the state, the law and the alliance of patronisers, removed themselves from our homes and our beds and left us free to decide for ourselves in such matters.
Dr Vassallo is a member of the Committee of the European Green Party.
hcvassallo@kemmunet.net.mt