Updated | Labour ready to discuss changes to law, PN denounces PL for striking off voters

Updated at 1:52pm.

The Labour Party has said it is ready to discuss a change in legislation to current electoral laws, even though it is currently filing writs in court to strike off voters who do not fulfil the residency requirements in the electoral law.

"But it is not ready to ignore laws currently laid down in our Maltese Constitution," a PL spokesperson said. "The PN shouldn't fear anyone applying the laws of Malta correctly. If GonziPN wants to put its money where its mouth is, it should propose a change in legislation. Any attempt at playing cry wolf is at best puerile and at worst an example of arrogance and crass hypocrisy."

Labour is under attack by the Nationalist Party for having filed some 187 court writs this year to strike off people from the electoral register.

The practice is intended to remove voters who, as according to an electoral law that is as yet unchanged, are not in Malta for an aggregate of six months in the last 18 months prior to the last published electoral register; or are dead or mentally infirm.

At a press conference, secretary-general Paul Borg Olivier said Labour's policy was to strike off people who do not agree with them. "We are defending every individual's sovereign right to vote," Borg Olivier said.

The secretary-general also said that the PN had not filed any writs to strike off voters in the past 10 years. "We implemented the concept of a rolling register to have it continuously updated. But Labour's writs are affecting people working abroad, students, and people undergoing medical care overseas."

PN deputy secretary-general Jean Pierre Debono added that the writs had affected people who are actually residing in Malta, elderly who had visited their children in the UK, clerics who shuttle between Malta and Rome on a regular basis, and employees in the EU institutions in Brussels and Luxembourg.

"This tactic is totally contrary to the spirit of free movement inside the EU, and it is stopping Maltese citizens from using their right to study and work abroad and move around freely in Europe," Debono said. "We can also say Labour has already repealed some of its original writs."

Borg Olivier said Labour was taking a legalistic approach to the concept of electoral registers, while the PN felt politically that the concept of territoriality had been expanded since EU accession.

Back in January, Labour had defended a decision to present a number of court writs to strike off voters from the latest electoral register issued in October 2011.

Maltese law gives political parties the right to ask for names of voters who are away from the island for a period of six months throughout the last year and a half, to be struck off from the electoral register. The same applies for the mentally infirm who are no longer able to vote.

Parties striking off voters from the register has been a constant source of debate since a landmark ruling in 2003 when Alternattiva Demokratika's foreign affairs spokesperson Arnold Cassola, then secretary-general of the European Federation of Green Parties, filed a constitutional case to defend his right to vote after Labour claimed he did not satisfy the legal residency requirements.

On 21 March the court ruled that "residence does not mean a physical presence in the country."

The landmark ruling said: "A person abroad for study or work purposes may still be directly and continuously concerned with political activity in his country of residence and there lies no justification for the denial of that person's right to vote. Any other interpretation of the word 'residence' that is, a continuous physical presence in the country, could lead to a denial of the right to vote to a person having a direct and personal interest in the country's future and this in violation of Article 3 of the First Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights."