A judge ruled last week that five families are to pack up and leave, within four months, the houses they have called home for the last few decades, because they have no legal title to them and the owner’s fundamental human right to the enjoyment of his property has been violated.

This is a breakthrough judgement in the appalling situation that has prevailed in Malta for generations: that of state-sanctioned theft of private property. Protected tenants pay a peppercorn rent that might have been something back in 1920, and in 2013 the real owner of the property – the so-called landlord who is in real terms anything but – still can’t get their descendants out of his building.

There are different scenarios in which this happens, but the end loser is invariably the owner of the property. In this particular case, these five families lived in houses built on land which had been granted to their forebears in 1887 on temporary emphytheusis for 99 years. This title expired in 1986. Under a law enacted seven years earlier, in 1979, these families were given the right to convert their lapsed title into a title of perpetual (in other words, permanent) emphytheusis. All that was required of them was that they paid six times what they had been paying in ground rent previously: the equivalent of €4.66 a year, which even in 1887 was hardly a big deal.

The 1979 law which enabled them to do this was pure Mintoffian socialism in the worst sense: state-sanctioned theft of private property for redistribution to those who somehow felt entitled to live off (and in) property which they did not own, free of charge. Yes, free of charge – because you can hardly call €4.66 a year any sort of rent. This is social housing at the expense of private owners rather than the state, and quite frankly, in many cases it is not even social housing because many of the people who live in such ‘stolen’ property are perfectly well able to pay their own way by renting at the market price or buying their own home. It is just that they have become accustomed to living rent-free and home-loan-free and don’t see why they should give up the comfortable habit which they have acquired at other people’s expense.

The government says it will do nothing to change the law after this judgement, because it expects the families to appeal against it. Then once the appeal is through, the government may decide. Or perhaps not, because if these families of freeloaders win their appeal, then the owner of the property may take the case further, suing the government of Malta in the Constitutional Court and then the European Court of Human Rights. In that owner’s position, we would do the same.

Given that the Labour Party promised rent law reform in its electoral programme, it is somewhat surprising that the government says it will wait for an appeal outcome before moving. Does it really want to reform rent laws, or does it not? Compare its lack of will in this situation to its alacrity and determination in legislating for something which was not in its electoral programme: the sale of citizenship. Justice parliamentary secretary Owen Bonnici told the press that the government is “monitoring events closely and studying the scenario from a broad perspective”. Whatever that might mean, it sounds as though his office will not be giving off any heat and light in its haste to stick to its word.

In 1995, the Nationalist government had come up with a ‘run with the hare and hunt with the hounds’ fence-sitting solution in which the law was amended so that the provisions of the 1979 law could not come into play without the consent of the owner of the property. So in other words, that law effectively undid the 1979 law because no property owner was going to be nuts enough to consent. But it still didn’t provide a solution for those property owners who had had their land and houses effectively stolen from them under the 1979 law before 1995. When the state gives your tenants title to your property on a perpetual basis, what it has done is stolen your property and given it to others. Perpetual means forever. There is no way you are going to regain possession of what is still technically, but only technically, yours without a court ruling like this one last Wednesday. And even then, the free-loaders living in your property may yet appeal and win.

If the government believes that people like this are too poor to buy or rent their own home, then it should put them on the waiting-list for social housing (after first having ascertained that they really are too poor to buy or rent, even with the whole family pitching in). It is wrong and unfair to expect individual property owners to make good for what is in effect a social service, no matter how much real estate those individuals may own. The fact that some individuals own plenty of real estate does not make them justified targets for exploitation. The injustice is greater still when the property owner does not own a lot of real estate but perhaps only the house which has been sequestered from him, so that he ends up having to borrow money from the bank and pay off a loan to buy somewhere to live in, while third parties are living in the house he has inherited and paying him a pittance every year. Social justice cuts both ways. We tend to forget that.