Political party ABBA has filed challenge proceedings in the magistrates’ court to force the police commissioner to start criminal investigations against pro-choice activists and organisations who, it says, were acting in breach of the law.

The party, which campaigns on an anti-abortion platform, upped its legal challenge after the criminal complaints it had filed last March and again in October left no results.

The party wants the police to establish whether the activists were “breaking criminal law with regard to current abortion services in Malta”.

ABBA leader Ivan Grech Mintoff explained that the party wanted the police to investigate those who publicly and on various online sites encouraged pregnant women to discuss with them the abortion route, where they even started to promote abortion pills, referred pregnant women to Maltese or foreign doctors to get an abortion and also publicly associated themselves with foreign organisations to commit this crime.

Grech Mintoff said he had been informed by police inspector Joseph Busuttil through an e-mail that the police would not act on the complaints.

In October, he passed on several documents, photographs and footage to the police to substantiate further his criminal complaints.

Grech Mintoff said this evidence was enough for the police to charge a long list of women and organisations with conspiring with other people, in Malta and abroad, with the purpose of committing abortion, which was a crime, as well as complicity in the crime and with having encouraged others to commit the crime.

The NGOs and individuals it wants the police to investigate include those who have campaigned for Malta’s strict anti-abortion laws to be changed or called for support for Maltese women who seek to terminate their pregnancy.

These included the Family Planning Advisory Service (FPAS) that consists of three pro-choice organisations ‒ Doctors for Choice Malta, Women for Women Foundation and the Women’s Rights Foundation. Among those who had a criminal complaint filed against them were Isabel Stabile, Alexander Clayman, as president of Doctors For Choice, lawyer Lara Dimitrijevic as the director of the Women’s Rights Foundation, and Francesca Fenech Conti, as founder of the Women for Women Foundation.

Malta is the only EU country that completely bans abortion and has one of the world’s strictest anti-abortion laws. Women who abort their pregnancies or attempt to incur their own miscarriage, and any individual who aids them in doing it, risk a minimum of 18 months to a maximum of three years imprisonment if found guilty.

The law is rarely employed: no person has faced criminal charges for getting an abortion or providing the means to terminate a pregnancy in Malta in the last five years.

Between 2015 and 2020, the police investigated three people for alleged abortions, none of whom were arraigned. And, since the year 2000, only three women have been convicted of having an abortion.

However, around 300-400 Maltese women are estimated to travel abroad to have an abortion each year and pro-choice organisations claim hundreds of others order abortion pills online.

Lawyers Arthur Azzopardi, Frank Tabone and Jeanise Dalli signed the challenge application.