The Ombudsman Remedy in Malta
Ivan Mifsud,
Book Distributors Limited, 2020
This is a welcome publication on the Office of the Ombudsman because it fills a gap in Maltese legal literature.
In Constitutional Law, the tendency is to write on the legislature, the executive and the judiciary but to ignore, or give less importance to, other constitutional bodies and officers. The Ombudsman is one such public officer.
Further, this monograph could not have been written better than by Dr Ivan Mifsud, dean of the Faculty of Laws of the University of Malta, for several reasons.
First, he has been lecturing, examining and specialising on the subject of “Ombudsman Legislation” since it has been introduced in the Faculty of Laws’ teaching output. Second, he has first-hand practical experience of the subject as he has worked as an investigating officer at the Office of the Ombudsman.
This monograph could not have been written better
Third, he has been involved directly in the 2007 amendments to the Ombudsman Act whereby the office of Commissioner for Administrative Investigations has been established and has indeed also served as the investigating officer of the now defunct Audit Officer, now known as the “Environment and Planning Commissioner” following the 2007 reform of the Office of the Ombudsman.
Fourth, he has been involved not only in the direct application of the Ombudsman Act but also in its interpretation, expansion and critical evaluation.
All these factors place him in an undeniably excellent position to author a study of the Ombudsman Act both from theoretical and practical perspectives.
This monograph has also a utilitarian, in addition to an academic and institutional reform, relevance. It is designed as a reference work for all those students in the Faculty of Laws who study Ombudsman Legislation. It also sheds light on how the Ombudsman institution came into being, developed over time, and reached the stage where it is in today.
However, this monograph is far from a chronicle of the Ombudsman’s achievements and failures: it is not intended simply to laud the Ombudsman’s efforts as defender of the citizen but to reflect deeply on the current deficiencies of the Office of the Ombudsman, not solely from a legal perspective but even from an administrative one and, after identifying these areas for legislative and administrative improvements, proposes a number of measures that can be implemented to better empower the Ombudsman as the citizen’s defender against the might of the public administration.
I thus recommend this publication not only to members of the legal profession, the judiciary and to students who want to have a ready reckoner of the Ombudsman institution, but also to the public administration who is at the receiving end of the Ombudsman’s reports.
This may do well to recognise its failures, of the members of the House of Representatives who have not acted upon Ombudsman reports addressed to them, to complainants, to foreign academics studying Ombudsman law, and to the public at large who have an interest in seeing improvements being made to the Office of the Ombudsman.