The number of pending civil court cases has reached an all-time record, sliding below 8,000, according to a European Commission report. The Country Report on the justice sector says that the clearance rate for civil cases has improved drastically.
Justice Minister Owen Bonnici said he was very happy with the results, which proved wrong the people who had said that the justice sector reform was a lost battle.
The clearance rate for administrative cases, which are cases instituted against the authorities, shot up from 28.6% in 2010 to 410% in 2015. "This means that for every new case that comes in, the courts are clearing four cases," Dr Bonnici said.
The disposition time, in other words the time taken for a case to be concluded, went down from an average of 2,758 days in 2010 to just 485 days in 2015.
The time taken to conclude all civil cases went down from 866 days in 2010 to 447 days in 2015.
The number of pending cases stood at 10,845 in 2010. In 2015 that number had decreased to 9,459. Dr Bonnici said that the number of pending cases currently stands at 7,812. This was the first time in recent history where the number of pending cases was below 10,000, Dr Bonnici said.
The European Commission, he said, had pointed towards three main factors that contributed to this improvement. These were the introduction of court attorneys, the reform in the judiciary appointment system and procedural improvements. Dr Bonnici said that, despite these positive results, the government would not rest on its laurels and more improvements were in the pipeline.
The Country Report deals only with civil cases. Asked about criminal cases, Dr Bonnici said the government had also worked hard on this sector. A number of improvements had been made, including the introduction of the right to disclosure, the right to an attorney during interrogation and the right to appeal the Attorney General's decisions in drug cases.
More needed to be done, and the government is currently tackling the problems caused by the process to compile evidence in court. These compilations will now be tackled by lawyers from the Attorney General's office. Many promising young lawyers had responded to a call for applications, the minister revealed. "We are doing this not because we do not believe in the police force but in order to speed up the process and free up police resources, which means they can focus more on investigations."
Dr Bonnici also announced that a report on the results of the drug law reform will be published in the coming days. The minister could, for the time being only say that there was a "big success" in simple possession cases.
Asked why the police were still arresting people for possession of joint, Dr Bonnici said the police needed to get information in order to be able to fight drug trafficking.
from The Malta Independent http://ift.tt/2mcGfrR
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