Updated 11.35am, adds PN statement

The police have issued criminal charges against two senior government officials over their failure to ensure minimum health and safety standards at the Gozo courthouse.

Last year, the Occupational Health and Safety Authority had carried out an audit and found multiple shortcomings. It gave the court authorities time to bring the building in line with the regulations.

Now, Gozo Courts director general Mary Debono Borg, 59, from Fontana, and Court Services Agency chief executive Eunice Maria Grech Fiorini, 42, from Tarxien, are to be charged – in their personal capacity – over multiple failures.

Borg is the mother of Nationalist Party MP for Gozo, Alex Borg. 

They are due to appear before a magistrate in Gozo later this month and charged with failing to ensure health and safety standards are upheld at the courthouse in order to avoid any injury or death of employees and anyone attending court sessions.

According to the OHSA, they omitted to carry out a proper health and safety assessment of the courthouse as a workplace of hundreds of employees or to choose a person responsible for the health and safety of the workers.

They also neglected to implement a proper fire and evacuation plan as specified at law.

They will also be charged with failure to carry out an assessment on the loads being carried by employees, ostensibly referring to case files that are ferried to and from the court registry.

Furthermore, they didn’t install proper signage at the courthouse, the charges say.

The Gozo law courts are situated in a cramped old building in the Citadel, Victoria.

Only five improvements made

Times of Malta reported last year that an OHSA audit had identified 16 shortcomings but only five changes were fully or partly implemented after the court authorities were given three months to do so.

The audit had been ordered by Magistrate Joe Mifsud after a violent incident took place outside the court rooms. When the magistrate asked for video footage of the incident, he was informed there was no CCTV.

In its report, the OHSA said it was evident there were “breaches of various provisions of law which fall under occupational health and safety legislation”.

Of the 16 actions requested by the OHSA, inspectors found that CCTV cameras and fire extinguishers had been installed around the building, proper desk chairs were provided to employees, a first aid kit was made available and personnel were trained in first aid.

But the courthouse still had no designated health and safety representative, no designated employees responsible for fire-fighting and evacuation, no fire detectors, alarm systems, emergency routes or exits and no fire drills conducted on a regular basis.

Furthermore, no maintenance had been carried out on the flaking walls, there was still no proper ventilation, the humidity levels had not been addressed and workstations not upgraded.

Building deemed inaccessible

The Gozo law courts, situated in a crammed old building in the heart of the Citadel in Victoria, have been faulted on other counts by the Commission for the Rights of Persons with Disability, in another audit ordered by Magistrate Mifsud in the same case.

The commission concluded that the courts were not only vertically inaccessible, with stairs being the only way to get from the ground floor to the upper levels where the courtrooms are located, but also failed the horizontal test because the different floors have several levels.

The commission made a series of recommendations which it hoped would deliver a “barrier-free court system” in a building that would be fully accessible and would not create any health hazard.

Plans to relocate the law courts have been on the cards for more than a decade.

When Labour was elected to power in 2013, it had pledged to move forward with plans, drawn up by the previous administration, to construct a new building in another part of Victoria.

However, a line of Gozo ministers have never brought those plans to fruition.

Late last year, lawyers refused to attend sittings in the Gozo court, bringing cases to a complete standstill for a month, in protest over a number of shortcomings they had identified as needing urgent action.

They finally returned following “reasonable progress” made in addressing their complaints, which ranged from the poor condition of the courts to lack of efficiency.

Political responsibility should be shouldered - PN

In a statement, PN justice spokesperson Karol Aquilina said the two public officials against whom charges had been issued depended upon the financial allocation, long-term planning and political will of Labour Ministers.

The Labour government had been promising to move the Gozo court for years but political rivalry between the three people who served as Gozitan ministers in the past nine years led to plans being changed repeatedly.

Aquilina said the Opposition insisted on decisive and urgent action to improve the situation and this was not done by shifting criminal responsibility onto public officials but by the political responsibility being shouldered by those who had been responsible for the sector in the past nine years.

The Justice Minister, he said, should also decide that the Gozo court building should stop being used if it was unsafe.