At present, there is no legal definition of mental health, but occupational mental health-related issues include not only worker suicides but also absenteeism, presenteeism, easy dismissal of employees in a slump, increased workload for colleagues due to continued unreasonable employment, a reduced sense of belonging to the organisation and decreased workplace communication. These are all challenges that our society has long been encountering.
Different countries deal with mental health-related issues in different ways. In the EU, issues have been considered in terms of PSRs (psychosocial risks) that include harassment, but responses vary from country to country as well.
In 2014, Japan was the first country in the world to make it legally mandatory for employers to implement periodic stress checks. The law limits eligibility to conduct stress checks to physicians, public health nurses, dentists, nurses, psychiatric social workers and accredited psychiatrists who have received prescribed training.
Japan's stress check system began as a suicide-prevention measure, but it aims to prevent poor mental health. Poor mental health includes not only mental disabilities and suicide but also stress, great distress, anxiety and a wide range of other mental and behavioural issues that may influence workers' mental and physical health, social life and quality of life.
It is fairly well established that even mental stress will lead to a variety of health disorders if it persists or becomes excessive.
The law mandates the use of the Stress Check Programme at least once per year in all workplaces in Japan with 50 or more employees. Employers shall not be informed of the results of the stress check for individual employees without consent from these employees. Employers shall provide employees with a physician interview at their request.
The rationale for mandating the Stress Check Programme is to decrease the risk of mental health problems in workers by increasing their awareness of their own stress through periodic surveys and feedback, decrease work-related stressors
"The current system of assignment of magisterial duties does not allow for a duty magistrate to deliver judgment in respect of minors, even if there is an admission"
by analysing group stress survey results and improving the work environment, and prevent mental health problems by screening for high-risk workers and providing them with opportunities to have physician's interviews.
How about emulating and enforcing such legislation in Malta?
Another cause for court delays
Not long ago, a case involved three teens getting arrested, arraigned and charged in front of the Magistrates Court with having committed theft aggravated by means and value.
On arraignment, the teens admitted to the charge, but the court pointed out that despite their admission being registered at the earliest stage, the teens would have to be handed a sentence by another magistrate presiding over the Juvenile Court.
The current system of assignment of magisterial duties does not allow for a duty magistrate to deliver judgment in respect of minors, even if there is an admission.
This particular system needs to be changed to cut down on useless and unnecessary dragged-out proceedings, especially in cases where minors are involved.
A simple amendment to the criminal code can easily remedy this shortcoming in the same way as when, in 2015, we introduced the highly soughtafter legal mechanism whereby courts of criminal jurisdiction may assume the functions of a Drug Court and proceed to refer the accused before the Drug Offender Rehabilitation Board after being satisfied that the conditions stipulated by law are satisfied.
Furthermore, if the case is directly related to the trafficking or possession of illicit drugs per se, the functions of a Drug Court may be assumed by a court of criminal jurisdiction in cases where the quantity of the drug does not exceed three hundred grammes of cannabis or one hundred grammes of heroin or cocaine.
Once our legislators were capable of introducing a simple procedural mechanism in those instances, can't they equally introduce the mechanism I am proposing above, whereby in those circumstances the Magistrates Court is empowered to deliver judgment there and then on admission of the teen accused?
A police commissioner with a constitutional role
It is inconceivable how and why, while our constitution gives its due importance and protection to the role of the president, judges, magistrates, the ombudsman, the attorney general, the state advocate and the auditor general by requiring a two-thirds majority parliamentary vote for their removal, it fails to afford such importance and protection to the commissioner of police.
I think that there is a delicate and ill-defined relationship between the executive and the police in Malta.
To what extent, and how can the minister for security and internal affairs, being the one responsible for Maltese policing, involve himself with the work of the police?
The separation of powers between the executive and the police should be as much a constitutional pillar of Maltese democracy as that between the executive and the judiciary. Elsewhere in the Commonwealth, codified constitutions do enshrine police independence and function as constitutional values.
Our constitution should make it clear that, although a minister oversees the police, that minister has no power of command within the police force, which helps ensure the police force maintains its mandate to be impartial and objective.
Since the rule of law is a fundamental principle of the constitution, the independence of the police is necessarily a component of this.
I do not think anyone would dispute that a minister should not direct the police to arrest specific people, order surveillance or otherwise task individual law enforcement decisions. It would be unconstitutional for the minister to advise the police to arrest a specific person and equally unconstitutional for the police to obey such advice.
Good sense and consideration on both sides of our House of Representatives should lead to amending the constitution to include the position of a police commissioner with security of tenure alongside other pivotal and prestigious roles mentioned above.