Former chief justice Vincent Degaetano is worried about the way investigations and prosecutions are handled and says that a special branch of the judiciary, rather than the police, should deal with serious crime.

“If there is a perception that incompetent people are at the helm, once the image is for any reason whatsoever tarnished, the system starts to crumble,” he said.

Asked whether he felt this could already be happening, Dr Degaetano, a judge at the European Court of Human Rights, replied: “I don’t think one would necessarily say the system is crumbling, but there are certainly problems of perception with the way in which a number of State institutions are functioning.”

In an interview with this newspaper in January, Dr Degaetano called for “a really independent investigative service for serious offences”.

There are certainly problems of perception with the way in which a number of State institutions are functioning

In another interview with the Times of Malta, he pointed out that one could not feel confident that the police, which were part of the executive arm of government, would “properly investigate offences possibly involving high-ranking people in the executive itself”.

He suggested that Malta adopts the system employed on the continent, where the investigation and prosecution of serious offences are generally conducted by a public prosecutor who was a member of the judiciary.

If someone who has just been actively engaged in or with a political party becomes a judge the next week, in today’s world that is not acceptable

Dr Degaetano also commented on the appointment of members of the judiciary having political baggage and said that such roles should not automatically rule them out, noting that there were some well-respected members of the judiciary in the past who had been politically active prior to their appointment.

Yet he added a proviso: “In this area, however, perception is sometimes more important than reality.

“If someone who has just been actively engaged in or with a political party becomes a judge the next week, in today’s world that is not acceptable, though it could have been acceptable decades back by colonial standards. The perception is that you are appointing someone of your own political inclination, simply to make things easier for the executive.”