When he was speaking at the inauguration of the forensic year, the new Chief Justice had a particularly trenchant warning to make.

He criticised lawyers who, instead of respecting the finality of court decisions, tried to prolong proceedings by new applications.

A crucial factor for any judicial system was that of “certainty,” stemming from the finality of court decisions, the Chief Justice observed, referring to a “small number of lawyers who do all they can to make sure that a legal dispute never reaches an end even after the final pronouncement by the Court of Appeal.”

After losing a case, such lawyers would, sometimes even many years after the final judgment, ask for a retrial and when this was denied, “suddenly claim that there was no fair hearing and thus file a constitutional case.”

“This is not a professional attitude,” Chief Justice Azzopardi remarked, adding that such behaviour merited a suspension of the lawyer’s warrant.

The outgoing president of the Chamber of Advocates, George Hyzler, on his part regretted that litigation lawyers had become “a threatened species,” in spite of the fact that the number of legal graduates had “exploded” to some 100 each year. 

Many lawyers had evolved into businessmen, Dr Hyzler said, and the time had come for this situation to be addressed, even in the interests of clients who needed to know whether the person they resorted to was a lawyer or a businessman.

Speaking about the efficiency of the courts, Dr Hyzler said that in spite of everything, “unfortunately we have not yet found the cure to this endemic illness,” pointing out that although the disposal rate of caseload had improved, globally fewer cases were decided when comparing records from 2012 and 2017. 

Taken together, these two statements are quite surprising and it is equally surprising there have not been any comment in the media in the weeks since these statements were made.

The most serious statement, in our opinion, was that made by Dr Hyzler, who said that fewer cases were being decided when one compares 2017 to 2012. This happened, we add, despite the increase in the number of judges and magistrates.

The Chief Justice, on his part, identified part of the reason: lawyers who instead of accepting the finality of a Court of Appeal, persist in raising the matter again even after a lapse of years and ask for a retrial or claim there was no fair hearing.

The Chief Justice said such lawyers should be punished. This perhaps is a drastic suggestion but actually the matter is worse and no amount of punishment is enough to curtail it.

This is a practice that must not be allowed as it makes a mockery of all judicial proceedings. Cases which one would have thought had been decided suddenly appear as not decided at all. The people caught in the midst, usually the victims, suddenly find their cases are still open and without a proper conclusion.

Those who are conversant with what is going on at the Law Courts would add names here, including some quite notorious cases, which have been lingering on for years and years and which successive judges seem impotent to come in and stop the abuse.

This is where the legislator must intervene and put an end to such abusive behaviour. In the weeks since the Chief Justice and the former president of the Chamber of Advocates made their very public complaint, we have not heard any reaction from the normally loquacious government and minister nor any commitment to cut down on this abuse.

It is high time to climb down from the high chair of resounding statements and tackle abuse head on.

This editorial was published in The Malta Independent printed edition.