A dilemma for Madam Justice Schembri Orland

Dr Jason Azzopardi has placed Madam Justice Lorraine Schembri Orland in an awkward dilemma. Dr Azzopardi, on behalf of his client, former and now reinstated mayor of Victoria, Gozo Samuel Azzopardi, has brought a case before the Constitutional Court, asking it to accept his client’s plea that Magistrate Joanna Vella Cuschieri should not hear and decide the libel case which Samuel Azzopardi had instituted against Minister Anton Refalo, due to the magistrate having been a PL candidate in a general election.

The judge who has been assigned this constitutional case is Madam Justice Lorraine Schembri Orland, who had been a candidate on the PN’s list in the 1992 general election. If this judge were to accept Dr Jason Azzopardi’s plea that Magistrate Joanna Vella Cuschieri should not hear the libel case instituted by the PN mayor of Victoria, the question arises why she had accepted to hear and decide a much more “political “case, namely that of the two extra parliamentary seats which Madam Justice Schembri Orland has already heard and decided in favour of the PN? Eddy Privitera Mosta