People, including some foreigners who died suddenly in Gozo in the last six years, are still in legal limbo as no full death certificate can be issued (with imaginable consequences to their families) because the inquiries into their deaths have not been concluded yet.

This, and complaints from many people with court cases in the Gozo Court, has led the government to officially demand a full list of the cases that were being handled by Magistrate Antonio Micallef Trigona before he was transferred back to Malta last February.

Sources at the Gozo Court told this newspaper that Magistrate Micallef Trigona brought back with him to Malta some 40 civil cases he had been hearing and some inquiries, some dating back five years; however he has not yet handed out one sentence on any of these. However, many of these cases may have their sentences passed on 25 October when many of them are listed for hearing.

The huge delays accumulated in the cases handled by Magistrate Micallef Trigona contrast sharply with the way the new magistrate sent to Gozo, Magistrate Anthony Ellul, has been handling his cases.

Magistrate Ellul begins his court sittings at 8am and from around 200 cases he has handled, has already concluded 60.

Delays at the Law Courts have inched up again, despite the increase in the number of the judiciary, and sometimes court cases just depend on which judge/magistrate the case gets, which is unfair to the citizen.

For instance, it has been ascertained that some magistrates who recently resigned on reaching retirement age left a sizeable number of deferred cases and no magistrate is happy taking on a case begun by somebody else, because it is the magistrate/judge that hears the evidence who really gets the feel of the case, something one just cannot get from reading the transcripts.

Delays at court, however, are not the prerogative of the Gozo Court in recent times. A magistrate recently found that a man, brought before the court and charged with infringing his bail conditions, had been under these bail conditions for seven years during which the case had been left for sentencing, which was never pronounced.

Another issue that should be looked into by the Commission for the Administration of Justice regards the question of the many times judges/magistrates travel abroad, sometimes on court business, but sometimes also for sports reasons when the member of the judiciary is on some sports committee. Yet when lawyers try to argue for a postponement for personal reasons, the judiciary does not always welcome them.

Sports, and its accompanying bugbear, sponsorship, could also lead the members of the judiciary into tricky issues of conflict of interest. So too is the chairmanship of some committees, even if high-minded. Thus, the other magistrate in Gozo, Paul Coppini, who heads the NGO Heritage Gozo, could not hear the case regarding the Nadur proposed cemetery due to this connection.

But the most insidious problem facing the administration of justice regards conflict of interest on a personal level. Such is the case of a member of the judiciary who one day was handing out a sentence against MEPA, but then turned up at a public hearing on a development abutting his residence; he is also a party in another court case against MEPA regarding a property in Gozo and turned up to testify in his defence and against MEPA. There is no real line which says a member of the judiciary cannot turn up at a public hearing nor that he cannot testify in cases which regard him as a citizen, but the overall impression is a rather messy one.