The country’s environmental lobby has grown by leaps and bounds over recent years, and the government, as well as the Opposition for that matter, will ignore this growing movement at their own peril.

The main political parties would do well to take note of what the environmentalist are saying. There was a time when their numbers were negligible when it came to the grand electoral stakes, but those times are now behind us. 

The environmental lobby as a whole has grown significantly in recent years and it is only a matter of time before their clout grows enough for them to well and truly begin to set the political agenda in Malta, as has been the case in so many other countries. If their messages are not heeded, one fine Election Day, maybe not the next but eventually, one or both of the big parties could very well be in for an unpleasant surprise.

From land reclamation to the Gozo bridge, from the ever-controversial spring hunting issue to the boathouses in Armier, the public at large is becoming ever more discerning about the environmental ramifications of government decisions.

And it is perhaps this latter issue of Armier and how the present government deals with it that will be a make or break point with the country’s environmentalists.  Although it is a long and sordid story, suffice it to say that various governments under both of the main political parties have handled the issue with kid gloves, caving in to the demands of the boathouse owners for fear of the repercussions at the polling booths.

But now that the courts have ruled that the owners of the boathouses and caravans, located on public land, have no legal right to occupy the land they are on, some for decades, push has come to shove.

And with the majority of the country’s environmental NGOs, as well as the Green Party, having called for immediate action on the issue in the form of eviction and demolition orders, the present government’s environmental credentials are being put on the line and it will be interesting to see how the government deals with the issue after the promises it has made to the Armier ‘squatters’.

But the issue should not by any means be reduced to a mere trade-off of votes, as has been the case so many times when it comes to the hunting lobbies, with the government weighing the balance to determine which course of action will secure it the most votes. This is an issue of doing the right thing, right for the environment and right for the majority of this country’s citizens.

The issue has festered for far too long now but it has now presented the government with an opportunity to prove its declared interest in safeguarding the environment and citizens’ rights. The way in which the government deals with this thorny issue will be perhaps the first of several environmental litmus tests it will have to undergo.

Revising the concordat

It is wholly encouraging that the Prime Minister has acted quickly on his pledge to revise the Church-State agreement on marriage annulments. This week, in fact, he travelled to the Vatican for discussions with the Pope and senior officials from the Holy See to set out the ways and means of dealing this long-standing bone of contention.

For far too long, some 20 years in actual fact, the Maltese courts have been subservient to the Church’s Ecclesiastical Tribunal insofar as marriage annulments are concerned. The agreement as it currently stands grants supremacy of the Ecclesiastical Tribunal in matters of marriage annulments, meaning that only when the Church tribunal grants an annulment can the Civil Courts do likewise.

The 1992 agreement has been in force for far too long and the need for a new concordat between Church and State on civil marriage is long overdue. Moreover, the landscape of marriage and its termination has completely shifted with the recent introduction of divorce to the country.

It is high time indeed that the special privileges accorded to the Ecclesiastical Tribunal under the Marriage Act were overturned, that annulment proceedings are brought under the jurisdiction of the civil courts of the land and that a clear distinction between Church and State is made in terms of our marriage laws.

This is not purely about removing the Church from the marriage equation, far from it – those devout couples who, for reasons of their own, choose to seek a marriage annulment should be able to bring their case to the Church Tribunal but this should no longer be a matter of course for everyone as it is now. Just as had been argued during the great divorce debate, those who disagree with divorce for whatever reason, religious or otherwise, should simply not get divorced. But a blanket ban on divorce for the whole of the country was, the electorate agreed, wrong.

The issue is not just about whether the Church or State has supremacy when it comes to annulments. The Church tribunal, for example, bans certain lawyers from representing their clients during the tribunal’s proceedings – a state of affairs that has denied people appearing before the tribunal their right to the legal representation of their choice, which is a fundamental right prescribed by the tenets of natural justice.

The Prime Minister had announced the bold step that would essentially scrap, or at least substantially revise, the agreement back in March during a meeting with the Archbishop just after being elected, and he followed up on that quickly. That was a huge step in the right direction – in the direction of the full accordance of civil liberties that he has promised to implement if and when in power.