Malta’s newly proposed law recognising femicide was the talk of last week for mostly good reasons, but was also the talk of this newspaper’s front-page on Sunday after the fully published Bill showed a point which was glaringly discriminatory.

The Malta Independent on Sunday revealed this weekend that the new law is in fact discriminatory against men – not because of the principle it seeks to enforce, but because of the way it is written.

The law, as presented by the government, contains a stipulation that for a femicide to be considered as being such, it would have to be committed by a person of the male gender.

This means that if a femicide is committed by a woman or a person identifying as, for instance, non-binary, then the courts are not bound to consider the circumstances of the case as they would if a man were to be the aggressor.

Indeed, former European Court of Human Rights Judge Giovanni Bonello said that “it is very obvious that the Femicide Bill introduced recently is problematic from the discrimination angle”.

“It treats a homicide committed by a man on a woman in a different manner from a homicide committed by a woman on a woman, or by a woman on a man, or by a man on a man. If the only or the main reason of this difference in treatment is the sex of the victim, then this could be impermissible discrimination that falls foul not of one, but of all three instruments mentioned [these being the Constitution, the European Convention of Human Rights, and the European Convention],” he said.

“The Constitution expressly permits positive discrimination in favour of women, but only if the discriminatory measures are aimed at accelerating equality between men and women. It is difficult to see how the measures, as proposed in the Femicide Bill, would accelerate equality between men and women,” he concluded.

Likewise, two top criminal lawyers contacted by The Malta Independent on Sunday were baffled at the wording in the law, both agreeing that, as it is now, it is discriminatory because it opens a window for murders which are femicides but not committed by men to be treated differently than if they were committed by men.

It’s a pity that such a law, which does provide added protection to women and may act as a deterrent for perpetrators of disgusting and violent crimes on women, has been written with such a glaring error within it.

One must question whether this was owing to a lack of legal consultation on the Bill, which certainly has not been in the works for a long time – namely because Justice Minister Edward Zammit Lewis, said that it would be pointless to make femicide a criminal offence just three weeks before he presented the new law.

Zammit Lewis said that the government should not legislate according to knee-jerk reactions, but it appears that this is exactly what the government has done in this case: tried to push a law out as quickly as possible in reaction to an awful murder, and in the hope that it can be passed before the country goes to the polls.

Still, there is still time for changes to be made to the law, as it must still go through all of the procedural hurdles that Parliament presents for new laws.

Even if a femicide is much more likely to be committed by a man, it can be the case that it is committed by a woman.  The law must reflect all possible realities, not just the most common, and one hopes that the legal interpretations which this newsroom has uncovered are heeded and that the necessary changes are made in order for the law to truly be able to protect women.