In 2019, a Serbian woman was handed a removal order just one week after giving birth to her premature son at Mater Dei Hospital.

The child needed life-saving treatment and continuous medical care, and backed by medical staff and a team of law students, she challenged the removal order, remaining in hospital for two years to be with her son.

The students, supported by practising lawyers, made her case in front of the Maltese authorities and eventually obtained a residence permit for her, allowing mother and son to travel abroad for treatment.

The woman is one of dozens of people who has been provided free legal services through a law clinic set up in 2017 by the Chamber of Advocates and the University of Malta’s Faculty of Law.

The clinic is the brainchild of its director, David Zammit, who had started looking into introducing something of the sort over 15 years ago.

Partly hosted by the Cottonera Resource Centre, the clinic has seen some 242 student teams handle around 369 cases between 2017 and the beginning of this year. The clinic mainly deals with issues of migration, housing and family law, but also property, consumer, succession and criminal laws.

For each case, a team of students is allocated a warranted, practising advocate who takes legal responsibility for all decisions. The chamber actively sources such supervisors while advocating for a pro bono culture, a concept that is not yet very popular in Malta, one of the clinic coordinators, Kurt Xerri told Times of Malta.

He notes that around a third of the clients are migrants who cannot afford legal representation, and the number of referrals continues to increase.

“We are not keeping up with the demand, however, we are hopeful that more practising lawyers start providing pro bono work,” Xerri said.

“We have actually noticed that the new generation of lawyers coming out of university is increasingly becoming more humane in its approach to social issues, and new graduates are enrolling as practising lawyers at the clinic to supervise students.”

Students’ enrolment at the law clinic, which forms part of the Civil Law Department, started off as something optional but has now been made mandatory.

And as the number of cases continues to increase, talks have kicked off to turn the clinic into an autonomous institute separate from the department.

Discussions are also underway to set up a clinic branch at the Gozo University Campus and a separate one in Valletta.

50 per cent increase in cases every year

The number of cases handled by the students grows by some 50 per cent every year – 59 teams of students handled 123 cases during the 2020/2021 scholastic year – up from 12 teams handling 20 cases in 2017/2018.

This scholastic year, 65 teams handled 99 cases up until the end of January.

Xerri recalled that one of the first cases which was successfully handled by students at the clinic under the supervision of fellow coordinator, Ibtisam Sadegh, concerned a Nigerian man detained at the Safi detention centre.

The migrant had contacted the clinic to file a complaint with the European Court of Human Rights about the dire conditions at the centre and the unlawfulness of his detention.

The applicant also complained about the domestic legal-aid representation he had prior to contacting the clinic.

The ECHR took issue with many aspects of the applicant’s detention, including time spent detained in isolation without exercise, and a subsequent period where he had been detained with people under COVID quarantine unnecessarily.

Overall, it found that the conditions were inadequate and degrading, that the authorities had not been diligent enough in processing his deportation and that the reasons for the applicant’s detention had ceased to be valid.

He was awarded €25,000 in compensation from the state, but since his residency application was rejected, he technically cannot receive the money as he has no bank account, Xerri noted.

For Zammit, a milestone case remains the one when a team of students managed to successfully petition the authorities to reunite a woman from the Ivory Coast who had given birth in Malta, with her husband in Spain.

The woman had been airlifted to hospital from a migrant boat and separated from her husband in the process.

And in yet another successful case, a Yemeni couple who flew to Malta with a diplomatic passport that was not recognised here, managed to obtain refugee protection.

The couple had fled persecution but the police authorities in Malta initially detained them pending a removal order, Zammit recalled.