A Maltese court last week followed in the footsteps of the European Court of Human Rights, granting a double murderer serving a life sentence the right to apply for a review after 25 years.
Mr Justice Joseph R Micallef, presiding over the Constitutional Court, ruled that Brian Vella was entitled to apply for his sentence to be reviewed, upholding Mr Vella’s argument that a life sentence with no prospect for sentence review was incompatible with Article 3 of the EU human rights convention.
The European Court has on a number of occasions ruled that this article encompasses what might be described as the right to hope. It has also gone a step further and recognised that hope is an important part of the human person.
“Long and deserved though their prison sentence may be, they retain the right to hope that, someday, they may have atoned for the wrongs which they have committed. They ought not to be deprived entirely of such hope. To deny them the experience of hope would be to deny a fundamental aspect of their humanity and, to do that, would be degrading,” the ECHR has concluded in judgments on similar complaints.
Mr Justice Micallef quoted this decision and made it his own. He said that the right to hope does not mean that life sentences were in breach of human rights.
Nor was the refusal to accept a person’s request for a review of his sentence a breach of human rights.
They ought not to be deprived of such hope
However, a life sentence in itself was in breach of Article 3 if not accompanied by a mechanism through which a prisoner serving it could apply for a review.
Brian Vella murdered his neighbours, an elderly couple, at their Santa Luċija home on February 10, 2000. He gagged and bound 79-year-old Gerald Grima and his 63-year-old wife, Josephine, in their flat, before proceeding to ransack their house, stealing personal effects worth €460.
The decomposed bodies of the Grimas were found in their home a week later. A post mortem revealed they had died as a result of asphyxia due to gagging and that Mr Grima’s cause of death also included an intracranial haemorrhage.
“Here we have a brutal case in which two people’s lives were ended abruptly in a cruel way. Whoever did this must pay for his actions through an adequately harsh punishment,” the appeals court ruled when it sentenced Mr Vella to life behind bars.
Lawyers David Camilleri and Joseph Gatt, appearing for Mr Vella, successfully argued that their client could not be deprived of the right to ask for a review of his punishment. The Attorney General contested, arguing that Mr Vella had been granted prison leave on five occasions, showing that remedies available to him were available and working.
Sources close to the legal profession said that the judgment in favour of Mr Vella last week was considered a landmark one, as it was in line with a recent European Court of Human Rights judgment.
Late in 2016, the Maltese Constitutional Court accepted an application by Ben Hassine Ali Wahid, currently serving life in jail, for a review of his sentence. The Tunisian serial killer was found guilty, along with co-national Mohsen Bin Brahim Mosbah, of killing four people in 1988.