A commentary on the Constitution of Malta

Abstract

Ever since I started lecturing in public law at the University of Malta I had always considered writing a book on Maltese constitutional law. Since the promulgation of the Independence Constitution in 1964, Maltese constitutional law has steadily developed, sustained by a steady jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court, further strengthened by judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. We now indeed have a corpus of decisions of domestic courts and those of the Strasbourg Court which throw light on most of the human rights provisions contained in our Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights. Consequently a good part of this book deals with the way the fundamental rights contained in Chapter IV of the Constitution, and the provisions of the European Convention and its Protocols have been interpreted in more than six hundred judgments of the Constitutional Court. However there are other parts of the Constitution which have witnessed remarkable developments and improvements since 1964, in particular the introduction of electoral corrective mechanisms in 1987, 1996 and 2007 in order to maintain a proper balance and proportion between the number of votes gained by any political party and the number of parliamentary seats assigned to it. [excerpt from Preface]