Lawyers say they will not attend sittings in Gozo over severe shortcomings in administration

Lawyers working in the Gozitan courts have given notice that from today, they will cease to attend sittings in Gozo over severe administrative shortcomings.

In a statement, the lawyers said that they had been trying since June 2021 to attract the attention of the authorities so that the necessary improvements to Gozo’s law courts can be made, but to no avail.

Four months since their first protests, the lawyers said that there is still no assistant registrar working at the courts and there is still a shortage of qualified and trained staff.

The courts are also operating without a full-time marshall, and serious shortcomings in the building which had been reported by the Commission for the Rights of People with Disability had been “totally ignored.”

A number of other processes, the lawyers said, are not being found and a number of documents remain missing, while transcriptions are also not being done on time.

All documents, they said, are not being processed in time, and they’re not even being uploaded onto the courts’ online system, while nothing is being scanned either.

Decisions by judges and magistrates are, the lawyers said, also not being communicated to any of the interested parties.

As a result of all this, the lawyers have announced that as from 30 September they will not be attending any sittings which are held at Gozo’s law courts – something they said that they are doing with no disrespect to the court authorities or to their clients, but because they believe that this is the only way that their and their clients’ complaints can be addressed in the shortest time possible.