On 24 October, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg delivered its judgement in yet another two suits filed against Malta – one by a private individual, and the other by a commercial company. The red-hot subject matter affects thousands of Maltese citizens who have not similarly taken their case to Strasbourg, because of a lack of inclination, funds or knowledge that this option for redress is available to them. The case Edwards versus Malta makes particularly interesting reading, given that we are in the midst of a debate about our unfortunate rent laws – unfortunate, that is, for the owner of the property, but particularly fortunate for those who have a roof over their head for a pittance, while they use their own money to buy or build property elsewhere.

The government is one of the greatest abusers of the laws on rent and the requisition of property, which were intended by their enactors for use in emergency situations like war or its aftermath. The court in Strasbourg has decided in favour of Edwards and against Malta. A house and field owned by Edwards were requisitioned by the government more than 30 years ago, and have been held since then, against payment of the truly risible rent of five euros (around Lm2) a month. Edwards had already filed a case against the government in Malta’s Constitutional Court, which is the first step before going to the European Court of Human Rights. The Constitutional Court found nothing wrong with the government’s actions – I hate to be cynical, but what a surprise – and so Edwards went to Strasbourg, where the pan-European tribunal found that his human rights had been violated and that Malta’s Constitutional Court was wrong in its decision in favour of the government and against him.

In the second judgement delivered against Malta on 24 October, the European Court of Human Rights found in favour of the Central Mediterranean Development Corporation Ltd. What should have been a straightforward civil suit filed by this company in the Maltese courts has dragged on for almost 11 years. The company sued for compensation for the undue delay. The Civil Court, in Malta, dismissed its claim on the grounds that 11 years is not an unreasonable length of time. The company appealed to the Constitutional Court, which is the next step in these matters.

The Constitutional Court found that, yes, the delay was unreasonable, and then awarded the company Lm100 for damages suffered – about three per cent of what it was entitled to. This was so insulting that the Central Mediterranean Development Company gathered its resources and took its suit to Strasbourg. There, the court found that the amount it had been awarded was derisory, and that it should have been 7,500 euros. In the end, the company was awarded 3,000 euros, but one judge disagreed with this lowering of the compensation and put in a separate opinion.

These two judgements against Malta, by the European Court of Human Rights, are sadly not the exception but the rule. What is sadder still is that they never make the news, while in the days of Lorry Sant and Dom Mintoff, they would have been headlines. The difficulty here is that the party in government and the party in opposition are both compromised by these decisions against Malta, and neither has an interest in trumpeting them. The independent media, on the other hand, seem not to know about them, still less to realise their great significance.

The count now stands at 16 judgements by the European Court of Human Rights in suits filed against Malta by Maltese citizens or Maltese companies. In 15 of these cases, Malta’s Constitutional Court has been found to have failed in its primary duty of protecting the individual from the human rights abuses of the state.

Two judgements against Malta in a single day on 24 October was not a record. There were another two judgements against Malta on 26 September. They pertained to the rent laws, and in both cases, the Strasbourg court found that these laws are a violation of the owner’s right to the enjoyment of his or her property. Coming as the government prepares to present its white paper on rent, the judgements should have hit us like a bombshell, but strangely, nobody blinked – not even Alternattiva Demokratika, which is supposed to be the driving political force in the campaign for rent reform. One of the problems of human rights protection is when there is no public debate on human rights issues. In Malta, the Constitutional Court delivers important judgements – good ones or bad ones – and they never make the news. The European Court of Human Rights overturns those judgements – in 15 separate cases – and those don’t make the news either. Instead, we get to read about the Gift of Life Movement presenting a plastic foetus to irritated and bemused MPs, or the theft of two parrots from a garage.

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The Maltese citizens who filed these two cases first went to the Constitutional Court in Malta, as is the procedure. The lack of satisfaction they got there spurred them on to Strasbourg. The decisions by the Strasbourg court reminded me of the by now totally predictable situation in which it has to be an international tribunal to uphold the rights of Maltese victims of human rights abuse, because our own Constitutional Court doesn’t seem able or willing to do it.

In the case Ghigo versus Malta, the Constitutional Court had found nothing wrong with the owner being forcefully deprived of his property, against his wish, for 22 years, in return for a rent of five euros a month (Lm2). In the case Fleri Soler versus Malta, our Constitutional Court decided that it was perfectly acceptable for the Maltese government to requisition private property and keep it for 65 years, paying less than 18 euros a month up to 1988. All those decades ago, the property was probably requisitioned in an emergency situation for temporary reasons – but then the incumbents became so comfortable with the idea that they retained its use, ignoring the fact that the owner’s rights were being very much abused. The inaction of successive governments (and for the purposes of the law the government is one, the government of Malta) in returning this property to the rightful owners is shocking enough. What is more shocking still is that the Constitutional Court backed the government, rather than the abused citizen. Thank God for the European Court of Human Rights, and the fact that we now have a higher authority to which to take our injustices.

In the 15 judgements delivered so far by the Strasbourg Court against Malta, it is pointed out that our Constitutional Court has let the citizen down – the very citizen that the Constitution-al Court is supposed to protect against the excesses of the state. Do the judges themselves know that their judgements have been overturned? Somehow, I doubt it. Even if they do know, they have no interest in making the matter public. It’s too embarrassing.

Anyone with a computer and an Internet connection has access to the judgements. Go to www.echr.coe.int and then click on HUDOC. Here you’ll find a list that is updated every day. I trust that the officials entrusted with preparing the white paper on rent law will have the good sense to research the relevant judgements and allow for the implications, so that the new laws do not continue to violate the rights of owners, with a spate of fresh cases filed in our Constitutional Court and then taken to Strasbourg.

I hope, too, that the judges in our Constitutional Court bother to read them, so that the next time they are faced with a similar suit, they can refer to the Strasbourg decisions in reaching their own conclusions, and so save the plaintiff the trouble of going to the European Court of Human Rights, and themselves the embarrassment of having their judgements overturned by a superior body.

I would say that the vast majority of people do not even know that there is a Constitutional Court, and if they do, what role it plays – or should play – in protecting the citizen against the state. The media do not help matters by failing to inform readers, listeners and viewers. This “roll over and play dead” attitude is simply unheard of in countries with a long history of democracy and respect for civil liberties, among which we cannot count Malta. Our attitude today is a direct reflection of our repressed past. Then, we allowed bad things to happen because we lacked the will or courage to fight back. In a more subtle way, it is still happening today.

Significant judgements of supreme courts in democratic countries are headlines that very evening, and often public debate rages about them. The veil of silence drawn over the 15 judgements by the European Court of Human Rights against Malta is perturbing. I believe that it is in this column that they are being publicised for the first time. I have read or heard nothing elsewhere. Here we have a situation where our Constitutional Court has been found to have short-changed the citizen of his or her fundamental rights a total of 15 times. In all those cases, the Strasbourg court has found that Malta’s Constitutional Court failed to defend the citizen against the human rights abuse of the state.

Last July, in the case Zarb versus Malta, the Strasbourg court found that the Maltese Constitutional Court had violated the rights of this citizen. The distinction is crucial: it was not that the Constitution-al Court failed to defend Zarb adequately when the state violated his fundamental rights; it was that the Constitutional Court itself violated those rights. Zarb had waited a shocking 13 years to have his straightforward criminal trial brought to a conclusion, and the Consti-tutional Court had granted him two per cent of what he was entitled to in compensation. A little while before that, in the case Zarb Adami versus Malta, the Strasbourg court overturned a decision by the Maltese Constitutional Court, in which it had found nothing wrong with juries in criminal trials being composed entirely of men, or with just one woman among nine jurors. During the period in question, the composition of juries was, on average, 97 per cent men and three per cent women. And then on top of that, Malta had the temerity, or stupidity, to send in a list of applicants for the newly freed-up post of judge in the Strasbourg court that was made up solely of men. How Strasbourg must have enjoyed sending it back with a reminder that there is another gender.

Before the Zarb case, there was only one to make the news here in Malta: the case Maurice Mizzi versus Malta. DNA tests had proved beyond doubt that the young woman who had been presented to him as his daughter, but whom he had never accepted as such, was no biological relation to him. The Constitutional Court, flying in the face of scientific evidence and the existence of DNA testing which our archaic laws did not acknowledge then, decided that he had no right to challenge this fictitious paternity. The Strasbourg Court overturned that judgement. The unfortunate thing is that, had the Constitutional Court done its duty in the first place, instead of creating a situation in which the case was taken to the European Court of Human Rights, the young woman, her mother and the plaintiff would have been spared much of the cruel glare of public exposure in what, ultimately, is a personal tragedy – a private tragedy with public implications because of those judgements.

Another case against Malta, filed by the San Leonardo Band Club – yes, indeed – pertained to a decision by the Constitutional Court in which it found nothing wrong with the same judges who had given the impugned original decision – the decision about which the constitutional case had been filed – dealing with and deciding on the rehearing of the case when the reason for the rehearing was an error they themselves were accused of having committed. I feel tempted to put an exclamation mark there. Then there is the case Debono versus Malta, taken to Strasbourg because the Maltese Constitutional Court held that there was nothing wrong with the Appeal Court failing for two years and five months to appoint a civil appeal for hearing. The violation was not because the Appeal Court failed to reach a decision on the appeal during that extended period, you understand, but because it failed even to give a date for the start of the hearing. That might not seem unduly disturbing to you, because it’s par for the course. And this, of course, is what makes the situation so very disgraceful. Transgressions of our civil liberties and abuses of our human rights are taken for granted. Our attitude is as helpless and indifferent today as it was in Mintoff’s time. Abuse does not mean only violent physical assault and deprivation, but in our primitive way of looking at things, that’s how we see it.

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There have been more cases filed against Malta in the Strasbourg Court than these 16, of which 15 were decisions against the state. The other cases were disposed of on grounds of inadmissibility, rather than by judgements on the intrinsic merits of the suit. In other words, there was some procedural fault related to the application. The cases themselves, for all we know now, might have been highly valid. Had there not been those technical difficulties, they might even have resulted in more decisions against Malta to add to the already existing welter of them.

It was not just Mintoff who was responsible for the butchering of human rights in Malta, we should remember, but the Constitutional Court which had the duty to stop him and repeatedly failed to do so. The overt attitude of our politicians towards the citizen, and terribly, even the attitude of the citizens themselves towards their own rights and freedoms, is not as atrocious and aggressive as it was during the days of Dom Mintoff and Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici. Yet the underlying attitude remains remarkably similar: that the rights of the individual may be sacrificed for the so-called “common good”, or the good of the state. Citizens take it for granted that this can be done to them; governments take it for granted that they can do it if they want to, and if they will not suffer political damage as a result and the Constitutional Court makes it all possible.

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The very Maltese judges whose decisions were overturned by the European Court of Human Rights have applied for the vacant post as a judge in that same court. The irony is almost sublime, but again – no one has noticed. And what’s more, they are the ones whom the government has short-listed and nominated for the job. Clearly, the government hasn’t noticed, either. I prefer to think of it that way, rather than face the fact that perhaps the government did notice, but considered it a minor fact of little or no significance. Whichever way you look at it, we are going to scrape the bottom of the barrel with this one. No one in Malta has the required human rights expertise to take up the job left vacant, but one would think that the government would have a lot more decency than to select the very judges whose several human rights decisions were overturned by the very same human rights court they have applied to join.