The Nationalist Party on Monday filed a motion in parliament to cancel a controversial legal notice that allows the removal of online court judgments.
The legal notice gives the director-general of the court sole discretion to alter or remove judgments from the courts’ online portal.
Passed on the pretext of granting people the right to be forgotten, the legislation has been criticised for placing barriers to transparency and restricting knowledge that is in the public interest.
PN MP Karol Aquilina explained that the legal notice gives the director-general power to decide if there are valid grounds to have court judgments removed from the internet. According to the legal notice, the director-general is granted the power to either censor part of the judgment or have it removed entirely.
Aquilina told Parliament that a group of NGOs and media organisations had already written to Prime Minister Robert Abela calling on him to revoke the law.
“One of our fundamental principles is that justice must not only be done but must be seen to be and so like every other democratic country, judgments are given in open court and published for everyone to see,” Aquilina said.
He said he was against judgments being erased and insisted that these must be kept accessible to the public. Our system holds everyone accountable and removing sentences from the internet would be a regression, he said.
He added that the legal notice was flawed because it gave absolute power to the director-general, did not set out any criteria on how these powers should be applied and did not clarify the outcomes potential applicants could expect when applying to get their judgments erased or altered.
Aquilina said it was only after the publication of the legal notice that the government issued guidelines on the process. The guidelines were not included in the legal notice as it would be easier to ignore them in this manner, he said.
He called on the government to repeal the legal notice and start a period of public consultation about it with all stakeholders. “It is fundamental that justice is not only done but is seen to be done. How can people see that justice is done if the judgment cannot be seen?” he asked.
He also criticised the spirit of the legislation, adding that it interfered with the right to freedom of expression by hindering access to public documents.
He said there was an anomaly whereby all court appeals against the Financial Intelligence and Analysis Unit were secret but original decisions were public. This, he said, was unfair.
'Giving people a second chance'
Justice Minister Edward Zammit Lewis defended the legal notice, saying the only reason behind it is to give people a second chance. If someone committed a crime in his teens and the judgment is influencing his life now that he was on the right track, why cannot we give him a second chance? he asked.
He said the judgments were not being erased from the system but simply hidden. Journalists will still have access to the erased judgments through the court registry – the is a balance between the right of the person who was still carrying the stigma and the right to information.
“There is nothing clandestine in all this. There was an informal practice under previous ministers and I simply wanted to make it official and transparent. There are discussions on the right to be forgotten, across Europe and beyond. We are here to give people second chances and this is exactly what this legal notice does,” he said.
A vote on the motion will be taken on Wednesday.