Malta’s gender corrective mechanism should be revisited before the next general election, an international election monitoring board has said.

An international monitoring board from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) questioned in a report on Malta’s 2022 general elections the impact of the new gender-corrective mechanism which was adopted last year.

Through the mechanism, 12 women – six from the PN and six from the PL – were added to Parliament in order to try and bring the House closer to gender parity.

However, the expert team dispatched to Malta noted that the measures “serve to reinforce the two-party dominance in the legislature while failing to address structural barriers to the representation of women in parliament [and] political life.”

The OSCE recommended that the mechanism should be “revisited and revised” before the next elections, which should now take place in 2027.

The mechanism kicks in if the under-represented sex makes up less than 40% of all the seats in Parliament, with up to 12 candidates of the said under-represented sex possibly being added to the House as a result.

However, this only occurs if two parties have been elected into Parliament, and not more.  In fact in the last election, two ADPD candidates obtained a higher percentage of the election quota than the PN/PL candidates who were elected through the mechanism in their stead.

The mechanism has been challenged in court by independent candidate Arnold Cassola, who accused Robert Abela and Bernard Grech of creating a discriminatory system which allows them to reinforce only their own parties.

The Civil Court initially dismissed the case due to a lack of standing, but the decision was later annulled upon appeal by the Constitutional Court.