The government will soon table amendments to shorten to one year the stage in criminal trials known as the compilation of evidence.
The amendments form part of the government’s attempts to shorten the length of judicial proceedings, Justice Minister Jonathan Attard announced over the weekend.
He said the legal changes would also do away with an antiquated referrals procedure under which the case file keeps toing and froing from the court to the attorney general’s office with six-week intervals.
He did not reveal details of the changes but said they would impose new time frames for criminal cases, giving the prosecution a fixed number of months to present all its evidence in court. This would drastically shorten the current lengthy pre-trial proceedings in criminal cases.
Attard was speaking at the autumn conference of the European Criminal Bar Association held in Malta. The ECBA is an association of European criminal defence lawyers.
The issue of court delays has been a perennial problem for Malta’s judicial system.
Malta had emulated the British legal system in laying down the need for a compilation of evidence to take place before a criminal trial.
This has led to criticism that the justice system is far too slow – those accused of criminal offences can spend years attending court sittings before their case even reaches the trial stage.
Britain has since removed this requirement to speed up the legal process but Malta retained it.
The reform will also do away with the practice of stalling criminal proceedings until cases referred to the Constitutional Court are settled.
We’re ruining people’s lives
According to a 2020 Council of Europe report, criminal court cases in Malta take between double and five times as long as the European average. While here they take an average of 298 days to be concluded, in the EU that figure is 122. And second-instance criminal cases last an average 534 days in Malta compared to the 104-day average in Europe.
Among other themes, the conference discussed Malta’s controversial anti-money laundering laws under which all crimes are deemed to be money-laundering offences.
Veteran criminal lawyer Michael Sciriha spoke about the difficulties that court-issued attachment and investigation orders were placing on suspects, even at a time when there was not enough evidence to consider them as such.
“Investigation orders are being issued too easily and assets are being frozen for six months, extendable by a further six months. In the meantime, we’re ruining people’s lives,” he said.
He explained how the maximum allowable limit people can withdraw to live on – €13,976.24 – was set when the law was introduced in 1994 but never revised.
“We’ve had people who could not pay for medicines. Others who could not pay their children’s’ school fees. We need a new mechanism.
“Are our judges checking requests thoroughly, even by involving the defence? The fundamental principle of a fair hearing has gone to the dogs I’m afraid,” he said.
The “one-size-its-all approach” was bringing “misery” on people, he added.
Sciriha insisted it was not right that “someone owning a small shop who made a small mistake was getting the same treatment as the biggest drug baron”. The conference was also addressed by Madam Justice Consuelo Scerri Herrera who lamented the lack of administrative staff, transcribers and forensic experts at the disposal of the courts to deal with cases, especially complicated money laundering cases. She also said prosecuting officers require more training “as sometimes they weaken their own case”.
And on the annual amount allowed for subjects of investigation orders, she admitted that judges were “inundated” with requests to alter the amount but had their hands tied.