On election eve, Malta’s equality law remains on the backburner

One of Malta’s most far-reaching pieces of legislation has spent 12 months on the backburner after being presented at committee stage in 2020, with its detractors lining up in a queue to spike the Equality Bill.

Indeed it was a veritable cultural war that was waged last year against the ambitious rules to put a renewed onus on employers to curb discriminatory practices. Malta’s secular Christian organisations and faith schools are at the forefront of this opposition.

Piloted by former equality minister, now EU Commissioner Helena Dalli, the Bill was later stewarded by former parliamentary secretary Rosianne Calleja and the justice ministry, and after her resignation, fell into the lap of Owen Bonnici.

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But it has been 12 months since a series of parliamentary committee hearings for the Bill’s adversaries – like pro-life Life Network Foundation and the Catholic schools commission – who claim they will be prevented from employing Catholics to teaching positions.

That’s because the law presents them with a challenge: candidates to a teaching profession in which the Catholic faith is not a “genuine requirement”, could be able to challenge schools’ employment of less meritorious candidates.

Malta’s chief employment rulebook, the Employment and Industrial Relations Act, includes so-called ‘protected characteristics’ where any discriminatory treatment on marital status, pregnancy or potential pregnancy, sex, colour, disability, religious conviction, political opinion or membership in a trade union or in an employers’ association is illegal.

That law already gives leeway to employers on jobs that require a particular skill-set when “such a characteristic constitutes a genuine and determining occupational requirement provided that the objective is legitimate and the requirement is proportionate.”

For example, an ambulance driver would be required to be able-bodied enough to drive an ambulance in high-pressure situations, therefore ‘excluding’ persons with certain disabilities.

The same rules allow ethos-based employers, like church and faith schools, to recruit people for a role which objectively requires the employee to hold the same faith.

The Equality Bill reinforces the EIRA’s provisions but says the schools can differentiate “limitedly” on the basis of faith if there is a “sufficiently genuine and legitimate justification”. That means that it is only on those roles in which there is a genuine, legitimate, and justified purpose – for example, the teaching of religious education – that faith may be considered as a factor in their recruitment.

In July 2020, MaltaToday reported that the law might yet be tweaked to allay fears expressed by Church schools over the recruitment of teachers. Concerns were reiterated recently by Church schools over an exception that is limited only to the recruitment of teachers of religion. The schools want the exception to go further to ensure that all recruitment reflects the Catholic ethos of the respective schools.

But the Equality Bill also would make it illegal to discriminate against anyone when it comes to access to goods and services, advertising, financial services, education, trade union or association affiliation, jobs and recruiters, or carrying out business. It will mean that nobody can get “less favourable treatment” when it comes to supplying goods and services.

Critics claim the law stops doctors from refusing medical practices that are contrary to their faith: pro-life activist Paul Vincenti cited examples of doctors not allowed to conscientiously object to provide services to same-sex couples was “communism”; while Life Network chairperson Miriam Sciberras claimed that “threatening people into compliance” with equality “is tantamount to brainwashing and Marxist indoctrination.”