Yorgen Fenech’s lawyers renew human rights complaint over bail rejection

Yorgen Fenech has renewed his complaint to the European Court of Human Rights over the Maltese court’s decision to deny him bail.

Fenech, who is charged with masterminding the Daphne Caruana Galizia murder, has been held in custody since November 2019 while the compilation of evidence against him continues.

He was denied bail again this week with the magistrate asking the police to hasten their investigation and bring all civilian witnesses forward the earliest possible.

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Lawyers for the business magnate had filed an application before the ECHR in May last year, claiming their client’s human rights were being breached by continued detention. The lawyers filed another complaint last month to reflect more recent developments in the case.
Fenech had claimed that legal notices ordering the closure of Maltese courts last year, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, breached his right to a fair trial.

The lawyers said Fenech’s pre-trial detention was no longer for the purposes of taking him before a judge once the courts had been closed indefinitely.

The lawyers accused the Maltese courts of simply rubber stamping the emergency measures contained in the legal notices, saying the courts had failed to assess the question of the lawfulness of detention as distinct from the question of bail.

This absence of remedies deprived Fenech of his liberty without any possibility of review of the legality of his pre-trial detention.

Fenech had ended up in a “classical Kafkaesque situation” where, having suspended the applicant’s proceedings sine die, preventing any further evidence from being heard, the Maltese courts declined to grant bail on the basis, at least in part, that insufficient evidence had been heard, said the lawyers.