Hundreds of citizens are at any one point waiting for justice at our law courts. Small businesses seeking due payment, professionals seeking redress over unjust dismissal or small offenders waiting for the sombre judgement of the law on a minor offense. Meanwhile relationships, balance sheets and penal records are held under tension or in abeyance. For some, for many, while justice awaits their life is on hold, unable to move on.

It is natural that a court case may take a year or so. Most will understand that a reasonable waiting time is part of the inevitable discomfort of having to solve matters through legal means. When the wait extends to years and years, it then becomes intolerable. Waiting for three or four years for a matter which needed solving the day after it happened will then become an injustice greater that the fact giving rise to the same court case 

That is what is happening in Malta right now. The justice system creates injustices greater than those it purports to solve. The statistics speak as loud as the people coming out of the law courts. Malta’s law courts take up to eight times longer than the EU average to reach a verdict. Eight times longer, yes. 1,119 days for Maltese courts when compared to the 141-day EU average for a Civil court case.

This week Judge Francesco Depasquale, the president of the Union of Judges and Magistrates, dropped the gauntlet where it belongs. It is a government responsibility. Judge Depasquale confirmed everything that the Nationalist Party has long been saying on the serious lack of resources in our Courts. The government saw it fit to beef up ministries and government authorities with hundreds of additional hands as persons of trust. And yet, it keeps our law courts working with minimal resources, irrespective of the plight of hundreds waiting years for justice to be done with them.

Resources are lacking while the workload piles up. With EU laws becoming directly applicable to Malta, hence requiring judges to interpret and apply them to individual cases, and with new laws being enacted like the recently passed rent laws, the legislative arm is piling up work on our law courts while the executive arm fails to approve the budgets and the resources needed.

One would think that the recently established Court Services Agency would have eased the burdens on judges and shortened the times for cases to be decided. Not so. The establishment of this Agency simply increased the bureaucratic processes while not making sufficient use of the digital resources available to bolster the efficiency of the registry.

This falls in the lap of Justice Minister Edward Zammit Lewis who incidentally is the same Minister of State who was coordinating the Labour Party position on 17 Black with its very same owner and alleged mastermind behind the killing of Daphne Caruana Galizia. Zammit Lewis shunned without much consideration the calls for his taking responsibility for such damning relationship. Will he accept responsibility for delays in justice to hundreds of Maltese compatriots?

I doubt it. This Labour government is bred in the impunity it cultivated leading to the assassination of a journalist to cover the truth. That impunity is not a one-off thing. It is a culture that permeates and pollutes every decision. So one might ask, what does it take to end that impunity; to quash that culture and start afresh with a culture of service and national interest? Well, it takes a lot but very little. One has to detach oneself from the creator of such culture. In this case, it is evidently Joseph Muscat: the one who aided and abetted the evil plots which led to impunity.

So much is clear to us all. It is also clear to Robert Abela and all those around him. He has to repudiate Joseph Muscat and his legacy of corruption once and for all. That much is also clear to Joseph Muscat himself; hence the reason why he came out of his cavern to sit down with Herman Grech for a long interview. His message was clear for all minding to listen, but it was intended to one person in the main. His message was for Robert Abela: remember that we helped you overtake Chris Fearne who was leading in all polls with a great margin.

Abela’s hands are tied in the same way as Muscat’s hands were tied right after the Panama Papers scandal where he kept endorsing Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi. We know how that ended. Plus ça change…

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Peter Agius, PN spokesperson & MEP candidate