Peter Agius has asked MEPs to help a Maltese mother in her 10-year-long battle to receive maintenance payments from the father of her children.
The woman, whose name Agius withheld to protect her identity, was married and had two children before she and her husband separated in 2009. A Maltese court ordered her husband to pay €1,100 a month in child maintenance.
He eventually moved to France and settled there, but the payments were never made, the woman says.
Despite a 10-year struggle to get Maltese and French authorities to enforce the court decree, she has so far failed.
PN spokesperson and MEP candidate Agius has now stepped in to push MEPs to legislate to ensure such court orders are enforced across EU borders.
"She remains in the dark, without any explanation as to the reasons for the insufferable delay or to the actual state of play on the satisfaction of her due rights," Agius told the MEPs in the petition he filed to the European Parliament Petitions Committee on Monday.
"Europe is first and foremost about citizen's rights. If we fail to give a citizen his or her right then Europe is failing. In many cases, this system is providing solutions. There are however many other cases where it is failing abysmally. We should not accept a piecemeal success."
Agius told MEPs that the woman "sought the help of the European system of recognition of judgments to enforce the maintenance decree in France. The Maltese court decree was submitted to the Maltese national authorities in due form as per European Law in 2012, a good 10 years ago, for its execution in France, but to her knowledge, it never took place."
Agius says the woman was never given an explanation for the failure to enforce the court decree.
Consequently, she was forced to raise "her children with hardship, on her own means while these became teenagers from toddlers, without the due support of the maintenance decided by the Maltese court".
He urged MEPs to "unblock the bottlenecks and see that every case is treated as a priority" so that no European citizen has to go through a situation like this.