My professional and political colleague, the incumbent parliamentary secretary for justice, Dr Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici, has gone on the rampage during the last two years, reinventing the Code of Organisation and Civil Procedure.

He has now decided to amend some of his own amendments that he presented to the House less than two years ago. Ostensibly riding on the crest of the wave of the “success” he has publicly attributed to his own laws, he is not giving himself the opportunity to digest his amendments in the privacy of his office, let alone time for the laws to simmer in the boiling cauldron of the Courts of Justice.

There is, I sense, an air of urgency in his methodology. I suspect that he has come to the realisation that 19 years of successive Nationalist administrations have not helped at all in making the administration of justice efficient and expeditious. He must now have come to terms with the fact that, despite the intercession of various Nationalist justice ministers during all these years, the situation with the law courts has gone from bad to worse. In truth, the political responsibility for the mess at the law courts lies fairly and squarely in the hands of the Nationalist government.

Justice Minister Tonio Borg recently said in Parliament that “the situation cannot remain as it presently is”, and this is why his government is moving some controversial amendments to the Code of Organisation and Civil Procedure. Why has the situation “remained as it presently is?” Is it not because, in spite of various attempts by successive Nationalist justice ministers over a span of 19 years, they have miserably failed to deliver?

What have the Nationalists done to the administration of justice during these last 19 years? They adjusted the competences of the superior and inferior courts on various occasions, created the small claims tribunal, imported the Master system and then shot it down, appointed various judges and magistrates, created executive titles by judicial letters, appointed a pot-pourri of director-generals at the law courts, and created an international arbitration centre, abandoned it and then replaced it with the creation of a mandatory system of arbitration, in essence litigation parallel to other litigation in the law courts.

Notwithstanding all these changes, the situation has gone from bad to worse. Indeed, in spite of its much-vaunted “successes”, the Justice Ministry is still busy churning out new legislation at a breathtaking pace. Why? To make an already positive situation even better? Or rather to eject as quickly as possible the administration of justice from the sorry state in which it has found itself?

Listening to the speeches of the Justice Minister and his parliamentary secretary, you would be tempted to think that indeed we are turning the corner. But if we are really seeing the light at the end of the tunnel – thanks to the various amendments made to the Code of Procedure by successive Nationalist governments – then why on earth is the Justice Ministry now contemplating the introduction of a draconian piece of legislation that authorises a party to a lawsuit to transfer a suit from the competence of one judge to the competence of another?

I very much doubt whether similar legislation exists in other judicial systems in the European Union – in which case it is sensible to argue that, thanks to the enlightened intercession of successive Nationalist ministers, the administration of justice is now scraping the bottom of the barrel. How is it that the government has now gone so far as to introduce a system that indirectly hits out at the judiciary and legal profession generally?

It is because all previous attempts by the government to improve the smooth administration of justice have miserably failed and it is now high time for the ministry to blame judges, magistrates and lawyers for its own faults and shortcomings.

Dr Gulia is main opposition spokesman on home affairs