A Constitutional court this morning awarded Welshman Daniel Holmes €7,000 in compensation for violation of his right to a fair hearing.

The court ruled that the criminal proceedings against Mr Holmes had taken an unreasonable length of time and he had been exposed to arbitrary punishment.

Mr Holmes filed his constitutional application against the Attorney General, the Police Commissioner and the directors general of Courts and Gozo Courts.

He claimed that his fundamental human rights had been violated because of the unreasonable delays in the proceedings against him and because the unfettered discretion of the Attorney General to decide whether an accused person would face a trial by jury or proceedings before the Magistrates Courts.

Mr Holmes also alleged that he had been deprived of his right to consult a lawyer during the investigation stage and that he had not been provided with adequate legal aid, and that he had been discriminated against.

The facts of the case go back to June 2006 when Mr Holmes released a statement to the police explaining that the cannabis plants found in his possession were for his own personal use.

On June 21, 2006, he was arraigned before the Gozo courts and charged with importation, cultivation, possession and selling of cannabis. The police claimed that Mr Holmes was found to have just over a kilo of dried cannabis and 0.24 grammes of cannabis resin with a total value of €11,694.44.

Mr Holmes was assisted by a legal aid lawyer who was substituted by another legal aid lawyer in July 2007. But in September 2008 Mr Holmes appointed another lawyer who was not on legal aid.

The Attorney General issued the trial charges against Mr Holmes in January 2010 and the trial by jury was set for November 9 of the same year.

Once again Mr Holmes was represented by a non legal aid lawyer. The trial was put off without a date and without any reason for this being registered in the court records, and was later appointed for November 21, 2011 on which date Mr Holmes admitted to the charges against him.

On November 24, 2011 Mr Holmes was sentenced to ten-and-a-half years imprisonment and fined €23,000. This judgment was confirmed by the Court of Criminal Appeal on October 31, 2013.

Mr Justice Anthony Ellul declared that the European Court of Human Rights had ruled in the case "Camilleri vs Malta" that the unfettered discretion of the Attorney General to decide before which court an accused person would be tried was in violation of the European Convention which provided for protection against arbitrary punishment.

The same applied to Mr Holmes' allegation that he had suffered a violation of his right to a fair hearing due to the unreasonable delays in his case.

The proceedings before the Gozo court alone would have justified Mr Holmes' allegations, said the court. Mr Holmes had been arraigned in Gozo in June 2006 and the proceedings were only concluded in 2010 when the Attorney General issued the bill of indictment against him.

It was only in October last year that the proceedings against Mr Holmes were concluded before the Court of Criminal Appeal.

Mr Justice Ellul said that the court hearing the evidence which would lead to an indictment or a declaration of innocence had very little power to control the manner in which the prosecution produced its evidence. The only power to do so vested in the Attorney General's Office which was under staffed.

The courts themselves were overwhelmed with work, and if judges were to be retain hundreds of cases and be given new ones over and above, then cases like this would continue to occur.

In this scenario, it was not possible to always guarantee a fair hearing within a reasonable time.

The court dismissed Mr Holmes' complaints about his legal assistance, saying that he had been provided with adequate legal aid. The court also dismissed Mr Holmes' action against the directors general of the Malta Courts and the Gozo Courts on the basis that they had nothing to do with his complaints.

In this case, Mr Holmes was represented by Franco Debono and Michela Spiteri.

Mr Holmes has another pending Constitutional case in which he is alleging further breach of human rights.