It’s official: Mr Justice Lino Farrugia Sacco will be spared the indignity of impeachment by virtue of his age – he will be officially retiring tomorrow.

Dr Farrugia Sacco was born on 22 August, 1949, and judges are constitutionally obliged to vacate their office on their 65th birthday. By avoiding impeachment, his pension is assured.

To avoid undue government interference in the judiciary’s work and ensure its independence, the Constitution grants judges security of tenure, stating that the office of a judge “shall not, without his consent, be abolished during his continuance in office.” But to keep the judiciary in check, it also enables Parliament to impeach judges, although such a motion needs to be supported by “the votes of not less than two-thirds of all the members” of the House of Representatives.

So far no judge or magistrate has been impeached, even though impeachment procedures had been launched against a number of them.

Three judges accused of corruption – former Chief Justice Noel Arrigo, Patrick Vella and Ray Pace – resigned shortly after impeachment proceedings began. The first two were ultimately convicted and jailed, while proceedings against Dr Pace were extinguished when he was found dead.

Two other members of the judiciary – retired judge Anton Depasquale and Magistrate Carol Peralta – faced impeachment proceedings. The former faced proceedings after stopping to turn up for work in an apparent protest, while the latter faced two impeachment proceedings, one put forward by former MP – now judge – Wenzu Mintoff and the other by then-Prime Minister Eddie Fenech Adami.

But these impeachment motions failed to obtain the necessary two-thirds majority in parliament after Labour MPs refused to support them.

The judge has effectively retired last January, when Chief Justice Silvio Camilleri reassigned all his court cases to other judges after the Commission for the Administration of Justice found him prima facie guilty of misbehaviour for ignoring its direction to step down from the post of president of the Malta Olympic Committee.

Impeachment proceedings against him had originally been filed in late 2012 by former Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi, Last January, however, Speaker Anglu Farrugia ruled that the impeachment motion was effectively rendered dead because Dr Gonzi was no longer an MP and because his motion was never discussed before the previous legislature was dissolved.

Prime Minister Joseph Muscat filed a fresh motion, but last February, Parliament’s House Business Committee decided to postpone parliamentary debate and vote on the motion for the judge’s impeachment until a Constitutional case was decided.

The Constitutional Court dismissed his claim that his right to a fair hearing had been breached when the Commission for the Administration of Justice decided that its decision on the first impeachment motion against him also applied to the second.

The judge filed a second constitutional case, again claiming that his right to a fair hearing was breached, but his argument was dismissed in a ruling issued on 5 June.

In an apparent attempt to buy time, however, Mr Justice Farrugia Sacco appealed this ruling on the last possible day – 24 June. While previous sittings had been treated with urgency, online court records show that no date for a sitting had been set for the appeal.

When contacted, government whip Carmelo Abela confirmed that the government’s policy – to wait for legal proceedings to be exhausted before an impeachment vote is held – has remained unchanged, and that no vote would be held “unless a ruling is issued.”

With no sitting in sight, let alone a ruling, the judge is thus free to celebrate an honourable retirement tomorrow.