Jury or No Jury: Malta's Courts Draw a Legal Line

By Harvey Specter Jr. | Law, Business & Power Correspondent

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Twelve strangers walk into a room and decide whether you spend the next twenty years in prison. No legal training. No obligation to explain their reasoning. A verdict that cannot be appealed on the merits of the evidence alone. In most of the democratic world, this is called justice. In Malta, the question being asked with increasing urgency is whether it crosses the line into something else entirely.

The debate over whether Malta's jury system breaches human rights is not new — but it has sharpened considerably as the Yorgen Fenech trial grinds forward, as courtrooms fill with uproar, as defence lawyers trade accusations with witnesses, and as the public watches a high-stakes murder prosecution play out in real time. When the architecture of the trial itself becomes the story, that is the moment to stop and look at the walls.

Under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, every accused person is entitled to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal. The word "tribunal" has never been read to require professional judges — juries have survived every challenge to that standard in Strasbourg for decades. But the right to a reasoned decision is something the European Court of Human Rights has wrestled with repeatedly. In *Taxquet v Belgium*, the Grand Chamber ruled in 2010 that a verdict reached by jury without reasons does not automatically violate the Convention — but only where sufficient safeguards exist to allow the accused to understand why they were convicted. Sufficient safeguards. That phrase does a lot of heavy lifting.

Malta's jury system operates within a criminal justice framework where the jury delivers a bare verdict: guilty or not guilty. No written reasons. No obligation to explain which witness they believed or which piece of evidence they rejected. For an accused facing a life sentence, this creates a structural problem: you cannot mount a meaningful appeal if you do not know the basis on which you were convicted. The law permits appeal on points of law, on procedural irregularities, on misdirection by the judge. What it does not permit is a challenge to the jury's internal reasoning — because no record of that reasoning exists.

The human rights argument, properly framed, is not that juries are unfair by nature. It is that the absence of reasons, combined with the emotional volatility that high-profile Maltese cases inevitably carry, creates conditions in which the line between evidence and public narrative becomes dangerously thin. A courtroom where a defence lawyer publicly declares that a state witness should be ashamed of himself — and where that moment makes headlines — is a courtroom where the jury is also a spectator to something larger than the facts. That is not a theoretical risk. That is the environment.

There is a second dimension to this that most commentary skips. The right to a fair trial under EU law — specifically Article 47 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights — is not merely a procedural right. It is a substantive one. The Charter applies wherever EU law applies, and Malta, as a Member State, cannot retreat behind domestic procedure when the underlying question touches on fundamental rights protection. The European Court of Justice has been increasingly willing to look past national court structure to ask whether the actual experience of the accused met the standard the Charter demands. Malta's jury model has not been tested at that level. It may eventually be.

I spent years before the suits watching people get processed by systems they didn't understand, handed outcomes they couldn't contest, and told that the procedure was followed correctly — as if procedure and justice were synonyms. They are not. The law is the map. The power behind the law is the driver. A system that delivers verdicts without reasons gives the accused a map with no roads marked.

None of this means the jury system in Malta should be abolished tomorrow. It means the question deserves a serious answer from the people responsible for giving one — not courtroom theatre, not political point-scoring, but a structural review of whether the safeguards around Malta's jury process are sufficient to meet the Strasbourg standard the country is bound by. If they are, demonstrate it. If they are not, the time to address that is before a case reaches the European Court of Human Rights and the answer arrives from Luxembourg rather than Valletta.

The best outcomes happen before anyone files anything. That principle applies to governments as much as it applies to my clients.

Your move: If you or someone you know is facing criminal proceedings in Malta — jury trial or otherwise — request in writing, before anything else, a full explanation from your defence lawyer of your appeal