When, about a year ago, I was asked by Dr Anna Vella to address this meeting, my initial reaction was: What on earth do people want to know from the Chief Justice about the family? I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, an expert in Family Law – my expertise, if I may claim any, is in Criminal Law (which I taught at the University of Malta for many years right up to my appointment as Chief Justice) and, by virtue of having worked for many years in the Attorney General’s Office before being “kicked upstairs” in 1994, I also have some experience in Public Law. Never having been in private practice, I have never had to file writs, or to reply to writs, to deal with such matters as separation between spouses, or custody of children, or maintenance to be paid to a spouse or to her or his children. Nor am I a psychologist or a family counsellor. My degree, among others, in criminology and sociology of deviance seems to point in the opposite direction of good couple and family relations. In fifteen years of service in the Attorney General’s Office, the nearest I ever came to dealing with family matters was when I had to file, in two separate cases, applications before the Court of Voluntary Jurisdiction on behalf of the Chief Government Medical Officer so that doctors in government service could override the decision of the parents of children who were refusing to authorise blood transfusions for the child patient on religious grounds; and in another case I had to appear for the marriage registrar, again before the Court of Voluntary Jurisdiction, because the marriage registrar was refusing to recognise a “talaq” divorce obtained in Pakistan by a Pakistani husband from his Maltese wife on the ground that the procedure involved in such divorces (at least at that time in Pakistan) was not regarded by the said registrar as a “judicial procedure”. This lack of experience in Family Law and, perhaps more importantly, the lack of experience in the sensitivity attaching to Family Law cases, came back with a sort of vengeance when I was made a Judge in March of 1994. It is not uncommon for judges,...(more)