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In Malta the children of a lesser God are the illegitimate children and juvenile delinquents. In the case of illegitimate children, they are still considered as bastards by our law and in the case of juvenile delinquents, they are left on their own until they can be sent to prison.
Our illegitimate children do not have the same rights in our law as children born in wedlock.
Their birth certificate still has the word ‘illegitimate’ printed on it, and as if this was not enough, they cannot inherit from their parents and have only the right to one-third of the legitim of ‘normal’ children. This means that children who have either of their parents married, cannot inherit their dead parent irrespective of whether they die intestate – without leaving a will - or not.
It is true that there is a bill before Parliament trying to ease some of the pain. But the bill does not put illegitimate children and other children on a level playing field because it only gives the right to the married parent to bequeath to his or her illegitimate children as well. This means that if the parent dies intestate, the illegitimate child only has the right to one-third of the legitim.
You may recall that the Constitutional Court had, in the Buttigieg case seven years ago, ruled that a parent of an illegitimate child had the right to make a will and dispose of his estate also to children born outside marriage. This was a case when the married father of an illegitimate child could not leave his assets to his son because of the law. Needless to say, the government is now, seven years later, providing an amendment in our civil law which is limited only to inheritance and which still leaves the other disadvantages that illegitimacy carries.
In the case of juvenile offenders the situation is much worse. When the ‘Approved Institutions’ were abolished in 1980, no new structure was created to replace them. Consequently, we have nowhere where to put our juvenile offenders for rehabilitation. Our juvenile justice system is non-existent and the Juvenile Court is a farce constituted by members appointed by the Prime Minister and helpless before a juvenile offender.
The case of the fourteen-year old Amir whose story was reported in one of our daily newspapers is an example of the failure of the system. Amir has had behavioural problems since he was a child and has been familiar with the Juvenile Court since then. He is a boy who is constantly beating his mother and grandmother and nobody knows how to control him. Every time that he appears before the Juvenile Court, he has a good laugh because they all look so helpless to him. There is no system in Malta where Amir can be placed under the formal control of the state for purposes of rehabilitation, incapacitation or deterrence.
He is too young to be sent to prison and there is no institution for children of his age where he can learn to control his behaviour. Needless to say, every time he comes out of the Juvenile Court scot-free with the usual words “tergax” or “oqghod bil-ghaqal Amir,” he tells his lawyer that “hadd ma jista’ ghalija” and he is given back the license to go and beat his mother and grandmother.
Amir is not the only case. I know of another boy who is thirteen year old and who is already taking drugs at the Paola Secondary School. His headmaster knows but keeps his eyes closed so that the school will not get a bad reputation. Sometimes he calls the police when he gets a complaint from the parents and the police search him lightly and obviously, they tell the headmaster that since they find no drugs on the boy they cannot take action.
This is as far as it goes in Malta as regards juvenile delinquency. Instead of the headmaster seeking help for the boy now that he has a drug problem he goes immediately to the police when the role of the police is not to rehabilitate but to prosecute. There is something wrong in the system and it is a pity that the school which is supposed to be not only a place for learning but also a place for nourishing, is not trained to take action to try and rehabilitate the child.
I know of endless cases when teachers tell you that they can detect from their school who will be the ‘criminals’ of tomorrow but they can do nothing about it because there is nowhere where they can report so that action is taken immediately for the rehabilitation of our children.
In Malta there is no juvenile justice system. There is no pre-delinquent intervention as there is in other countries where such cases are reported to what is called a ‘Youth Authority’ which is an agency responsible for these programmes. There is also no system of diversion. In the United Kingdom, these systems are very common and give the opportunity to first-time offenders in certain offences such as drug use, the responsibility and the opportunity to decide their future. The goal of diversion is to take the young offender out of the judicial system by imposing a programme in the community which may include also some type of counselling or assistance, sometimes even involving the parents.
In Malta there is also no system of pre-adjudication intervention wherein treatment programmes are given to offenders awaiting trial irrespective of whether they are under arrest or out on bail. In other countries, bail on its own is not enough but bail is given as a commencement to the treatment programme of the young offender. We have no juvenile correctional facility and no after-care system for our young offenders.
I am surprised how to date the Agenzija Appogg has not seen it wise to establish an adequate juvenile justice system in Malta. I do not know for how long the agency can watch teenagers being interrogated by the police as if they were adults, and witness young offenders being arraigned in the adult court as if they were adults. It is such a shame that first we instigate our children to become criminals by our incapacity to help them and then we make a show of them when they are arraigned in Court.
Some may argue that the juvenile justice costs money, but if a cost analysis is properly conducted, one may conclude that the alternative is more expensive. We have the resources and we have duplication of those resources and if we manage to pool the existing resources together and avoid duplication of efforts, costs would be reduced drastically. We have a responsibility towards juvenile offenders to prevent them from becoming criminals and to offer them a more comprehensive sentencing system.
More than 40,000US dollars were spent on me between 1996-97 to spend a year in the United States to study their juvenile justice system, under the Humphrey (Fulbright) programme, and to-date nobody has ‘dared’ to ask me anything about it!
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