The talk of the town of late has been about the system used (or abused) to appoint people to the bench. All hue and cry has been raised with the opposition saying that the government abused the system to give tailor made appointments to people in its closer circle. Franco Debono has gone on the warpath, accusing this and the previous government of not taking up his proposals.  The government, on the other hand, is scrambling to pick up the pieces.

The government has done well in some respects on the issue of judicial reform, and it is becoming clear from parliamentary questions put from time to time that show that the waiting list for cases to be decided, as well as the length of time for them to be decided is becoming shorter.

There was a time in Malta when jury trials used to take up to 20 years to even make it to court. Thankfully, those days are over. But a libel case this week – there is no reason to delve into the merits of it – was finally closed after judgment was delivered. It took 18 years! That statistic, that figure, beggars belief.

We must put all this into context. Up to just a few years ago, every single thing in the courts ran on analogue. We literally had a system where magistrates would have to repeat the entire testimony of a witness, pressing record and stop after every sentence to have an audio copy of what was said in court.

The magistrate or judges would also write out their judgments by hand, themselves. It was a truly backbreaking and time consuming process. Everything was done by hand, right down to the messenger who used to trudge from the Attorney General’s Office to court 20 times a day with his aptly named and archaic bound notebook with “Mill-AG”written on it. Things have thankfully progressed since then. We now have judicial clerks who assist the judiciary in drawing up judgement. There are fully digital recording facilities, video conferencing and more.

But still more needs to be done. It is a known fact that  lawyers do sometimes try and stall proceedings, obviously on direction of their clients. The Labour Party case in relation to the seats awarded to the Nationalist Party in the last election  is one that sticks out like a sore thumb. The party was so intent on delaying proceedings that it was protesting about having to produce certain witnesses before the case could continue, but then asked by the court, it did not even know what the relevance of these said witnesses were. This has to stop.

The judiciary should be given the tools to fine such parties to a case and fine them heavily, if they are deliberately trying to stall and prolong a court case. It is understandable that some of the older cases might have gotten bogged down, partly because all parties to the case might be going at the same snail’s pace that they were used to. But it is now 2016, we cannot tolerate a situation where a libel case takes 18 years to come to completion. It is simply ridiculous in this day and age.