Following two entirely positive decisions from the Courts of Malta earlier this month, the courts are no longer giving quarter to those who simply choose to ignore environment and planning regulations, blatantly flout the law of the land and choose to develop illegally.

The actions of such unscrupulous individuals must no longer be tolerated - not only do they make a mockery of planning processes, but they mire the Malta Environment and Planning Authority in years of expensive, time-consuming legal proceedings, time and money that could be far better spent by Mepa in so many other areas.

The issue at hand is that of illegal developers’ requests for the courts to issue prohibitory injunctions against Mepa, preventing it from taking what it calls “direct action”, in other words, from demolishing that which has been illegally built.

These prohibitory injunctions have been a root problem when it comes to real, effective enforcement, and the court’s backing up of this crucial element of the reform of the Authority is entirely welcome and comes not a day too soon.

For far too long so many people have been taking planning laws into their own hands. They build, Mepa seeks to take direct action, the ‘developers’ are granted prohibitory injunctions against Mepa action, Mepa’s hands are tied and the whole issue becomes mired in years and years of legal proceedings.

This farcical state of affairs has made a pure mockery of planning and environmental laws, as well as allowing those who break the law to flout their illegalities in the faces of the Authority and the government.

That now appears to have been brought to a grinding halt. The courts, in what Mepa has hailed as “landmark” decisions, cleared the way for the Authority to take quicker direct action, following two decrees issued against landowners who filed separate prohibitory injunctions to stop the Authority from taking direct action.

Arguing its case for the taking of direct action in two separate cases, the Authority cited the Environment and Planning Act stipulation that ‘no precautionary act may be issued by any court against the Authority restraining it from the exercise of any of the powers conferred upon it by the law during a direct action procedure’.

Giving appropriate weight to the section of law, the court in both cases ruled that the illegal developers had no right to present a request for a prohibitory injunction against Mepa as long as Mepa was acting within the confines of the law.

This ruling applies to cases in which illegal developers have already exhausted all the provisions provided by the law, as well as to cases in which the person chooses not to exhaust all such options.

This particular aspect of the Mepa reform, now endorsed by the courts, was one 2008 electoral pledge made good upon. The new policy, it had been pledged, would be for Mepa to tear down illegal structures and ask questions later – effectively reversing current enforcement practices, in which illegal developments sprouting up remain where they are until years of legal proceedings are concluded.

The new school of thought advocates first demolishing and then bringing the perpetrators to court, and the courts have now cleared the way for that to be done in practice, and in a far more expeditious way.

Faced with the rampant development – past, present and future – of the little land area the country has left, a serious rethink and a bolstering of all the areas under Mepa’s remit are necessities. And one of Mepa’s most effective remedies, and its best means of delivering preventive warnings, is the taking of direct action.

We would have preferred this particular pledge to have been implemented on the ground far earlier than it had been. And while seeing such concrete results three-and-a-half years after the announcement of an electoral pledge is, truth be told, pretty good going, there is never time for complacency in this area.

We must continually act to not only control the ongoing devastation of the country’s environment and the silently ruinous effect such development takes on the population’s quality of life – but we must also continuously act for posterity, for Malta’s future generations, whose own quality of life will depend very much on the decisions and actions we take today.