Since 2003, when 19 new pieces of legislation were approved, there has been a steady increase in bills being passed. A record of 65 laws were passed by Malta’s parliament in 2020, with statistics showing a significant increase in the House’s workload over the past two decades.
All this indicates that it may no longer be sustainable to have the highest institution in the land operating on a part-time basis, which would mean even more laws being churned out year after year. The rising workload can be partly attributed to society’s constant evolution, bringing about the need to introduce legislative frameworks for new realities.
The laws on the books are not there by accident. Most were enacted because they were supported by majority public opinion, influential interest groups or some combination of both. Perhaps we just do not care about the rule of law enough to eliminate any substantial number of current laws and regulations, especially those supported by our side of the political spectrum.
The rule of law may be less important to us than the rule of men whose agenda we like. Of course, it may be that we do not value the rule of law enough to sacrifice any other objectives to strengthen it.
This sad state of affairs is deeply at odds with the rule of law. Whatever else that concept means, it surely requires that ordinary people be able to readily determine what laws they are required to obey and that whether or not you get charged by the authorities depends more on objective legal rules than the exercise of official discretion. Unfortunately, neither holds true in our country today.
The real threat to the rule of law is inherent in the enormous scope of discretion possessed by the executive in a system where there are so many legal rules that almost everyone has violated some of them and it is not possible for law enforcement to target more than a small fraction of the offenders.
The vast majority of adult Maltese have violated criminal law at some point in their lives- Mark Said
Because of the vast scope of current law, in modern Malta, the authorities can pin a crime on the overwhelming majority of people if they really want to. Whether you get hauled before court or not depends more on the discretionary decisions of law enforcement officials than on any legal rule. And it is difficult or impossible for ordinary people to keep track of all the laws they are subject to and to live a normal life without running afoul of at least some of them.
The vast majority of adult Maltese have violated criminal law at some point in their lives. If you also include civil laws (which, though theoretically less severe than criminal laws, often carry heavy fines and other substantial penalties) even more Maltese are lawbreakers. The legislation today regulates everything from light bulbs to toilet flows. For most people, it is difficult to avoid violating at least some laws or even to keep track of all the laws that apply to them.
For example, it is almost impossible for small businesses to fully obey all the byzantine regulations that apply to them; for home and apartment owners to fully comply with every part of the complex building codes and zoning restrictions that apply in many localities; or for almost anyone to ensure perfect compliance with our hyper-complicated tax laws.
Ignorance of the law may not be a legally valid excuse. But such ignorance is virtually inevitable when the law regulates almost every aspect of our lives and is so extensive and complicated that few can hope to keep track of it.
Most Maltese, of course, never face punishment for their lawbreaking. But that is true only because the authorities lack the resources to
pursue most violators and routinely exercise discretion in determining which ones are worth the effort. Unless you are very unlucky or enter the cross hairs of law enforcement for some other reason, you may well be able to get away with a good deal of low-level lawlessness.
In this way, the rule of law has largely been supplanted by the rule of chance and the rule of executive discretion. Inevitably, political ideology and partisanship have a major impact on the latter. For example, law enforcement priorities are very different under a Labour administration than they were under a Nationalist one.
Even the law itself is often interpreted differently, depending on who is in power. The result is that the law can change substantially whenever a Nationalist administration replaces a Labour one or vice versa, even if parliament does not pass any new legislation.
The only way to make major progress toward establishing the rule of law would be to greatly reduce the scope and complexity of legal rules. The law is the anchor of our feelings.
If the law holds our feelings well, it directs our feelings well. If, however, the laws fail to hold our feelings well, our feelings become free enough for us to freely do what we feel.