Labour MP takes university to court after not being recommended for promotion

Labour MP Katya De Giovanni, a senior lecturer at the University of Malta has filed a judicial demand that the University reverse its decision to not recommend her for promotion to Associate Professor.

She is claiming to have been discriminated against by the Academic Promotions Board.

This emerged from a judicial protest filed by De Giovanni earlier today.

De Giovanni, who lectures at the Faculty for Social Wellbeing, said she had a legitimate expectation of success and felt the decision to reject her application was arbitrary and unfair.

She felt aggrieved by the dryness of the rejection letter she received following her formal request that the board re-evaluate its decision in her regard. The letter, she said, simply stated that following a “detailed analysis”, the Promotions Board could still not recommend her to the Council for promotion “as there were no grounds justifying a change from the original decision.”

“So detailed was the analysis carried out that the plaintiff’s request for reconsideration was refused without her even being given a reason, a breach of the established Administrative Law principle of the duty to give reasons for decisions,” reads the judicial protest, which was signed by lawyer Edward Zammit Lewis.

Neither had the Board sent for De Giovanni during the reconsideration process, the judicial protest states, arguing that this constituted a breach of another principle of Administrative Law, that of hearing both sides before taking a decision.

The two and a half year period between her submitting the application and its rejection was unreasonable and unacceptable, said the lecturer, pointing to other applicants who, she said, had received favourable decisions in a much shorter time.

In addition to all this, the Collective Agreement upon which the rejection was based had lapsed in 2018 and since been superseded by another - which De Giovanni claims the decision also breached.

The Board had failed to take into consideration, or even mentioned, six of the candidate’s publications, she said, and neither had it taken into account her curriculum vitae, which included the coordination of an undergraduate course in psychology in 2016 and serving as Chairperson of the Faculty Research Ethics Committee for Social Wellbeing.

De Giovanni also highlighted that in March 2021, at the time of her application’s submission, she had also been Chairperson of both the Psychology Warranting Board and the Social Care Standards Authority. The plaintiff added that she was also a Visiting Professor at the University of Padua and a Fellow of the British Psychological Society.

The successful applicants’ qualifications and experience were inferior to hers, De Giovanni said, adding that she would “be forced to name names” of the candidates selected by the Board, despite being less qualified than her, as evidence of the University’s “shocking discrimination” against her in the court proceedings that would follow.