Court orders €17,000 for 17-year case

A constitutional court has awarded Clyde Zahra €17,000 after ruling that the state took 17 years to bring his criminal case to a definitive end.

Times of Malta reported that Madam Justice Charmaine Galea, sitting in the Civil Court in its constitutional jurisdiction, found that Zahra’s right to a hearing within a reasonable time was breached under both Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Article 39 of the Constitution.

The chronology is the indictment. Zahra was charged in February 2006, when he was 16, with drug trafficking and involuntary homicide. The Court of Magistrates acquitted him completely on 16 December 2013, nearly eight years later. The Attorney General appealed. The appeal then took another decade and passed through four different judges before the Court of Appeal upheld the acquittal on 30 November 2023.

Seventeen years under criminal charges is not a legal technicality. It is the punishment of process after the court has failed to prove guilt. Judge Galea acknowledged the seriousness of the original charges, but said there was no unusual complexity that could justify such a span. What the judgment identified instead was more banal and more damaging: inactivity, delay and administrative shuffling.

The court noted that Zahra’s defence had caused only eight adjournments across the whole case, a finding that matters because delay cases often dissolve into a blame-sharing exercise. Here the constitutional court appears to have rejected that escape route. It placed particular weight on the appellate stage, where a routine appeal that, in the court’s view, should have required at most two sittings remained unresolved for almost 10 years.

That is not a quarrel about courtroom style. It is a finding about the use of state authority. The Attorney General exercised the power to challenge an acquittal. The courts then failed, for years, to decide that challenge. Between those two facts sits the actual harm.

A psychiatric certificate presented in the case said Zahra suffered prolonged anxiety and emotional distress linked directly to the unresolved proceedings. The court also noted that the bail conditions imposed in 2006, when he was still a teenager, disrupted his education. The damage award is compensation for a rights breach, not a restoration of the years the system consumed.

Judge Galea also drew a contrast that should not flatter the wider system too much. She praised the First Hall for issuing its judgment within a month of final submissions. Efficient judging is possible. The problem, on this account, was not some abstract inevitability of litigation but long stretches when nothing happened.

The court ordered the state to pay Zahra €17,000 within one month and to bear all legal costs. Zahra was represented by lawyers Roberto Spiteri and Roberto Montalto.