The European Court has found Malta guilty of being in breach of the European Convention for Fundamental Human Rights, the Labour Party’s spokesperson for justice, Anglu Farrugia, said.

In a decision handed down by the European Court on 15 January in procedures against Malta, the Court decided that Malta had violated Article 6 of the European Convention.

The reason was that a court in Malta, the Court of Appeal, was not impartial in an objective way because for many years in Malta there was a Chief Justice who dealt with a case where his nephew and his brother were appearing as lawyers defending the case, when this in itself was described by the European Court as not acceptable and as an “all in the family jamboree”.

“Maltese Judge Giovanni Bonello as one of the judges who decided the case, together with a number of other judges in the European Court of Fundamental Human Rights, also decided against the situation as it was under the Nationalist Government in the 90s, that the Maltese courts were breaking Article 6 which states that in every procedure every party must have the same rights as the other, something that was not so in this case,” said Dr Farrugia.