Prison inmates demand their release citing landmark ECHR ruling

A court has turned down a request by lawyers representing a man currently in jail for drug-related offences, who demanded that the courts order his immediate release on grounds that he had been convicted solely on the strength of a statement released during his interrogation, without legal assistance.

Magistrate Ian Farrugia held that the Court of Magistrates lacked the jurisdiction to decide the issue raised in the urgent application, filed today in the absence of a reply to a judicial protest, made in January by lawyers Jason Azzopardi, Kris Busietta and Julian Farrugia, on behalf of 40-year-old Trevor Bonnici.

Bonnici, who is currently serving time for drug-related offences, filed the application demanding that the courts order his immediate release as he had been convicted solely on the strength of a statement that he had released during his interrogation, without legal assistance.

Bonnici's conviction had been confirmed on appeal in 2015, “but in January, the highest court of human rights harshly criticised the Maltese courts,” Azzopardi argued.

“The more serious the charges, the more the need for access to a lawyer,” Azzopardi said, reading out the judgment against Malta.

“The dissenting and concurring opinion of Judge Albuquerque reddened our faces when he said ‘the Constitutional court of Malta chose to ignore the letter and spirit of the law’”

Bonnici had filed the judicial protest only 13 days after a court had ordered the Commissioner of Police and the Attorney General to pay €3,500 in compensation to another man charged with cocaine trafficking on the strength of a statement he had made without the assistance of a lawyer.

That judgement, in turn, had itself been delivered just two days after a landmark European Court of Fundamental Human Rights judgement in the case Mario Borg vs Malta, in which Malta was on the receiving end of harsh criticism for allowing this practice in the past.

Azzopardi decried the inaction of the State in addressing this issue. “The Maltese State is not just an accomplice, but a perpetrator of the breach of Trevor Bonnici’s human rights” by cocooning itself from its obligations, he said.

This afternoon, lawyers for Mario Borg – whose landmark judgement in Strasbourg opened the floodgates to cases such as that filed by Bonnici -also filed a constitutional application, saying that as the ECHR had confirmed that Borg's rights had been violated, the court must order his immediate release.

In spite of winning the European case, Borg is still languishing in prison, as the ECHR could only establish whether his rights had been breached and order the payment of compensation, not overturn a criminal conviction – a power vested only in the national courts.

The application filed in the First Hall of the Civil Court in its Constitutional jurisdiction, by lawyers Franco Debono, Amadeus Cachia and David Camilleri argues that as the European Courts could not substitute sentences handed out by national courts and had found a breach of Borg's rights, his sentence must be declared null and the case either be re-tried or Borg released.