Judge Edwina Grima has urged Parliament to legislate in favour of video-conferencing court sessions, with several cases now stuck in limbo amid the coronavirus crisis.

MaltaToday reported that Grima made this request during a sitting in which she denied a request by Yorgen Fenech, the major businessman charged with the assassination of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, to declare his continued imprisonment illegal.

Fenech’s lawyer Gianluca Caruana Curran argued that his client has a right to be innocent until proven guilty and that his continued detention despite court hearings being suspended for an indefinite period was illegal. 

“More than ever before, constitutional safeguards are needed,” he was quoted as saying. “Under our constitution, the safeguards are there to avoid abuses, but why are we being sent back to the draconian past? The case against Fenech has been postponed for four months waiting for three witnesses. He is still in prison and it is not a place where an innocent man should be.”

The lawyer said that the US had planned to suspend trials indefinitely too but that this was stopped by Congress on the grounds that doing so would create a huge humanitarian problem. Meanwhile, the UK was using video conferencing to continue holding trials and hearings remotely.

Lawyer Angele Vella from the Attorney General’s Office counter-argued that the legal notice suspending court sittings allows courts to open for urgent cases, questioning why Fenech’s defence didn’t file an urgent request for bail.

She added that the maximum 20 months of his arrest have still not been exceeded.

In her ruling, Judge Grima dismissed Fenech’s request to declare his detention illegal but agreed that video-conferencing should be introduced to allow sittings to continue without the risk of spreading COVID-19.