The Nationalist Party will be filing a motion in parliament to cancel a controversial legal notice which allows for 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.

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.

A group of NGOs and media organisations have written to Prime Minister Robert Abela and called on him to revoke the law.  

In a press conference on Monday, PN MP Karol Aquilina said that the Opposition would be filing a motion in parliament to cancel the legal notice and erase the law.

The government would then have 60 days in which it needs to call a plenary session and discuss the PN’s motion and choose to either reject it or hold a vote on it.

“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.

“According to the needs of the age, these are also published online. We are against sentences being erased and insist that these must be kept accessible to the public. Our system holds everyone accountable and removing sentences from the internet would be a regression in our justice system.”

He added that there were other “obvious” reasons why judgments should remain available online, including the fact that professionals often made use of such documents to complete due diligence exercises.

PN MP Therese Comodini Cachia added that the legal notice was flawed because it gave absolute power to the director-general of the course and did not set out any criteria on how these powers should be applied and what outcomes potential applicants could expect when applying to get their judgments erased or altered.

She also criticised the spirit of the legislation, adding that it interfered with the right to freedom of expression by hindering access to public documents.