Given the recent pronouncements from some of the country’s greatest legal minds on the state of the country’s state of the rule of law, we can now perhaps stop blaming those meddling foreigners for taking our institutions, and the ways in which they have been used and abused, to task as they have done.

We have had the European Parliament’s PANA Committee, its TAX3 Committee on financial crimes, its Rule of Law Monitoring Group and a raft of individual MEPs crying foul over the state of play here on our sunny, yet pretty shady, islands.

We have had the Panama Papers exposing some of our politicians’ financial machinations and the Paradise Papers taking to task Malta legal but questionable tax imputation system that deprives some fellow EU member states of what they claim should be theirs.

And while it may be easy enough to blame those meddling foreigners and the supposedly treasonous opposition and independent media for fighting for change on so many levels, it is not quite so easy when we have people of the legalistic calibre former European Court of Human Rights Judge Giovanni Bonello and the Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Malta Professor Kevin Aquilina saying there is something wrong with the way in which the systems has been leveraged from political exigencies.

The government might just get away with blaming the media, MEPs and the opposition for bringing matters to the pass they have reached, but the situation is only of its own selfserving making.

And while the government may point out that the statute books have remained unchanged for decades, and that this administration merely inherited the mess, it has to be noted that no one has seen such brazen behaviour when it comes to the judiciary as we have seen since 2013.

The situation is indeed concerning when Bonello tells our sister Sunday edition that 16 out of the last 17 appointments to the bench were all relatives of party politicians, cronies of ministers or are somehow political intertwined. We are glad some is at least keeping count.

Of similar concern is the indictment by the same legal eagle that the judiciary is now so packed with friends of friends that the problem will just keep self-perpetuating, even if the system is changed.

Of immense concern is the fact, as pointed out by the astute judge, that 90 per cent of Maltese cases that end up before the European Courts Human Rights are upheld – overruling what it considers to have been flawed judgements from the Maltese courts – and that special exceptions have been made in Strasbourg in cases against Malta. So much so that the ECHR is hearing cases from Malta before all the domestic remedies are exhausted – something the ECHR is usually most adamant upon, because the domestic remedies are, in actual fact, no remedy at all.

And when we have also the dean of laws weighing on the debate in an equally concerned way, we know we have a problem. When he says the judicial appointments will require at least two generations to address and to achieve the right balance, we know we have an even bigger problem before us, for at least two generations.

The writing is so clearly on the wall, that the balance of the country’s justice system is tipped toward the government that appoints its members is stuff from behind the Iron Curtain.

Not only does the system of appointments need to be rectified from here on in, but past wrongs must also somehow be set right lest we are to suffer the brunt of those partisan decisions for decades to come.

This, however, would take the gumption of a government that would actually want to take such remedial and proactive action.

Sadly, what we have is anything but that.