Attorney General ordered to pay €5,000 damages for 20-year long case

A court has ordered the Attorney General to pay €5,000 in damages to a group of heirs after it noted that the court case against them had taken over 20 years to be decided.

Heirs Filippa, Victoria, Joseph, Mario and Charles Seguna and Joan Mizzi had filed constitutional proceedings against the Office of the Attorney General and the Director of the Courts after losing a case which had originally been filed against their father and were ordered to pay a refund and interests accrued over 21 years.


Mr Justice Joseph Zammit McKeon heard how a certain Joseph Gatt had filed proceedings against Carmel Seguna in 1993, requesting the rescission of a sale of a racehorse, claiming it was not of the quality described before the sale.

Seguna's heirs succeeded him in the suit after the original complainant died.

The court was told that a court-appointed expert and a veterinarian had taken years to fulfil their duties. Even after all the evidence had been heard, another four years elapsed before the sentence was handed down. In 2014 the heirs were ordered to refund Gatt the price of the horse plus interest accrued over the years. An appeal to this sentence was subsequently filed but the case is yet to be allocated to a judge.

Lawyers Franco Debono and Amadeus Cachia, appearing for the heirs, had argued that the case had dragged on for decades due to circumstances entirely beyond their control. They claimed that their right to justice within a reasonable time had been breached by the lengthy delays.

This was a straightforward case, argued the heirs, held back solely by the shortcomings of the court-appointed experts.

The court held that the Director of the Courts was not the correct defendant in the case and was thus excised from the proceedings. The Office of the Attorney General argued that it did not bear any responsibility for the delays, highlighting the defendants’ duty to chase their lawyer to reduce delays as much as possible.

A staggering 78 sittings had been held over the course of the case's 20-year duration, with many hearings needing to be rescheduled when court experts would fail to attend. This, together with the inordinately long time taken by the court to deliver a sentence, was held to have breached the heirs' right to justice within a reasonable time.

The court ordered the Office of the Attorney General to pay €5,000 by way of moral compensation and to foot the bill for the costs of the case.