5% of vacation leave taken to attend court – Law Report

On TVM’s Bondi+ it was revealed that 1,505,000 hours  or 5% of vacation leave are taken annually by employees in order attend court sittings in Malta, with 4,600 people attending the courts on a daily basis. The data emerged from the recently published managerial consultancy document commissioned to study the situation at the Courts of Law over the 2003-2012 period. Surprisingly, only 4% of cases are put off by judges. It also emerged that there are over 25,000 pending cases in the courts, in what justice parliamentary secretary Owen Bonnici called a systemic failure of the justice system. Dr Bonnici said that a specific target to reduce the backlog was difficult to arrive to. He said that a balance has to be struck between what is most efficient financially, while still protecting the rights of the individual. He said that the cheaper option is not always the best option in a democracy. He said one of the measures that may be taken into consideration is that “petty” cases can be heard in the afternoon, when only 15% of the halls at the law courts are in use.