Drug trafficking in Malta carries with it a potential life sentence and one top criminal lawyer believes that the threat of going to prison until death is leading to a pileup of cases from people determined to fight lifetime incarceration. 

“Now that cannabis is legal in Malta, does it make sense that traffickers can be imprisoned for up to a lifetime?” lawyer Franco Debono wrote on social media.

“Even when cannabis was illegal, the punishment was much harsher than that of many European countries, but now that it’s legal it is a ridiculous situation.

“Does it make sense for trafficking in a law-abiding substance such as cannabis to be punishable by life imprisonment? This is why cases last longer because the penalties are much harsher.”

Malta’s Justice Ministry is set to announce some reforms to the abysmal court system, which has some of the longest delays in Europe. There are over 1,400 pending magisterial inquiries and 80 jury trials, some of which go back decades.

Debono said that a bulk of these cases involve drug trafficking.

A key focus of the reforms is imposing legal timeframes to clamp down on the plague of delays in the criminal justice system, as detailed by Minister Jonathan Attard in an interview with Lovin Malta.

Times of Malta has quoted unnamed government sources as stating that the proposed overhaul would set a one-year limit on pre-trial proceedings.

Another proposed reform would see an overhaul of the rinviji process, whereby evidence presented in criminal cases is passed on to the Office of the Attorney General every month, with the AG given six weeks to review it and decide whether more witnesses should be summoned.

However, the proposals are controversial among the legal community, with countless sources insisting that the proposed changes will do nothing to solve the issues.

In fact, Malta already sets a 30-day limit in the compilation of evidence stage, but the rule is seldomly followed with extensions, which are supposed to be the exemption becoming the norm.

Debono has already raised concerns, insisting that imposing timeframes could lead to a hasty justice system, and risk propagating injustices, with people thrown into jail unfairly.