Most of the compensation money paid to a man by the government for breach of rights ended in his lawyer's pocket, the victim argued in a dispute brought before the European Court of Human Rights.
The case was sparked when the man complained that compensation awarded by the domestic courts for a breach of his right to freedom of expression was outweighed by the costs and that, therefore, he was still a victim of the breach.
After attempts at an amicable settlement failed, the government finally decided to put paid to the man’s complaint by binding itself under a unilateral declaration to pay the complainant a fixed sum.
This turn of events led an ECHR Committee of three Judges, including Chief Justice Emeritus Vincent De Gaetano, to strike out the case from its list, after noting that the amount of compensation was consistent with that forked out in similar cases.
However, that was not to be the end of the story.
Four months down the line, a letter from the same man landed before the European Court requesting that his case be restored to the list of cases, arguing that the full sum promised by the government had never made it to his own pockets.
According to the complainant, “without his knowledge or authorisation,” his former lawyer had instructed the relative government agency to forward the lump sum to his bank account.
After deducting his own fees, deemed excessive by the client, the lawyer had forwarded a cheque for the remaining balance to his client who, however, refused to cash it, voicing his disagreement with the professional who subsequently broke off all contact with the disgruntled client.
At that point, the man once again turned to the ECHR in the hope of re-opening his case to redress the perceived injustice.
The Maltese government rebutted the man’s claim regarding his former lawyer’s allegedly unilateral instructions, confirming that the full sum had been paid in March 2019 on the basis of the authority signed by the applicant when his case had first been filed in 2017.
It was not for government to doubt information submitted by lawyers, the state attorney argued, noting further that under the Maltese system, a lawyer acted as mandatory of his client.
While calling for “a degree of circumspection” on the part of government when meting out payments, the European Court declared that in this case, there was no doubt that the fixed sum had been paid.
Nor were there “sufficient reasons to doubt the applicant’s lawyer’s actions,” the Court observed, adding that the lawyer’s refusal to hand over the full sum could not “be considered to reflect negatively upon the government”.
The Strasbourg Court, observing that it had “rarely restored a case to its list of cases following a strike-out decision in the light of a unilateral declaration,” noted that the conduct of a case was essentially a matter between lawyer and client.
Without prejudice to any remedy which the complainant could seek before the domestic courts, the European Court concluded that the circumstances did not merit the case to be restored to its list.