A party in a civil lawsuit has filed a constitutional application claiming that his rights were prejudiced through the conflicting role of the other party’s lawyer as a member of the disciplinary body for the judiciary. 

Geoffrey Borg, locked in a civil lawsuit with a vendor over the sale of a St Paul’s Bay flat in 2016, filed the constitutional application in the First Hall, Civil Court claiming that the presence of lawyer Pawlu Lia, as counsel to the vendor, prejudiced his right to a fair hearing. 

The raison d’etre behind this claim stemmed from the fact that Dr Lia, a long-practising lawyer, was also a member on the Commission for the Administration of Justice, the body tasked with handling disciplinary issues related to members of the judiciary. 

This meant that a judge or magistrate presiding over a case, such as the property dispute at hand, could possibly be facing disciplinary proceedings before the Commission, landing before Dr Lia. 

Worse still, since proceedings before the judicial watchdog were held behind closed doors and were not in the public domain, a party to a lawsuit would have no idea whether the judge or magistrate presiding over his case had any pending issues before the Commission. 

That statutory organ was presided by the President, and was composed of the Chief Justice, the Attorney General, two judges and two magistrates, the president of the Chamber of Advocates, as well as two members nominated by the prime minister and the leader of the opposition respectively. 

Dr Lia’s position on the commission placed him in a position of “potentially passing judgment on the judge or judges currently hearing, or who would eventually hear, this constitutional complaint itself,” argued the applicant’s lawyers. 

Faced with such an “enormous” disadvantage, through undue pressure and conditioning on the court, the applicant sounded the alarm, claiming that the situation could prejudice his fundamental right to an independent and impartial hearing and calling upon the court to provide an adequate remedy. 

Lawyers Franco Debono, Michael Tanti-Dougall and Amadeus Cachia signed the application.