However, there are still two major injustices ongoing in today’s Malta, which to date, neither PL nor PN has had the courage to tackle.

Many landlords and successive generations of their heirs are still burdened with leases that cannot be terminated and that can, under certain circumstances, be inherited by the heirs of these super-privileged tenants, at rent rates that were fixed at 1960s and 1970s levels.

Mintoff turned centuries of contract law on its head to stick it to the landowners of the day and reward the worst of his henchmen. The offspring of the original tenants continue to benefit from those absurdly low housing costs even today, at the expense of a discrete group of property owners.

There was never any means test applied to determine whether the original tenants needed the added protection of rents being frozen and eviction rights suspended for a 40-year period (or perhaps indefinitely).

Those tenants don’t lose these bulletproof statutory protections when they themselves inherit or purchase other properties of their own, which are then rented out at today’s market rates of rent.

Talk about two weights, two measures.

There has never been any compensation paid to landlords who were effectively forced, against their will, to become the providers of social housing under Mintoff’s dastardly plan.

To add insult to injury, the same property owners are charged by law to maintain the premises, in many cases spending far more on upkeep than they will take in by way of rental income over the course of a lifetime. Nor can these properties be sold for fair market value, being burdened as they are by leases (and tenants) who ought to have expired decades ago.

The only real exit strategy is for the landlord to finally yield, hand the keys over to the tenant, and walk away. Perhaps this was Mintoff’s full intention right from the outset.

What’s worse is that the recent “taparsi” amendments to Malta’s Rent Laws did very little to remedy the problem: true, the opportunity for some reletives to inherit these anachronistic leases has been narrowed, but it has not been closed altogether, and the injustice that was being inflicted on landlords prior to the amendments continues to this day.

The ECHR has explicitly and repeatedly called on the Government of Malta to remedy this situation for once and for all, but this has been totally ignored by the current adminstration.

Secondly, many other landowners are forced to fight one court battle after another, as the decades fly by and one generation after another passes away, to try to get just compensation for the properties that were seized outright by past Labour governments.

By its inaction, by the devilish legal tactics that it has adopted over the years, by their interminable delays in one court case after another, and by its failure to pay compensation promptly even when the Courts have stated over and over again that compensation is due in a given case, the current government, I am sorry to say, has become fully complicit with the former governments of Dom, Lorry, Joe and Alex in these ongoing and significant violations of the Constitution of Malta and the European Convention on Human Rights.

To make matters even worse, in the words of Justice Giovanni Bonello: “Though Malta bellows its allegiance to the supremacy of the Constitution, its Constitutional Court has embraced those doctrines most lethal to this supremacy: it endorses the legal heresy that anti-constitutional laws are just as valid and enforceable as constitutional laws are. It also accepts that an anti-constitutional law is unconstitutional with regards to Mr X, but is then perfectly constitutional and enforceable in so far as everyone else in the universe is concerned.” This is a complete abdication by Malta’s Constitutional Court of its most sacred duty. This is why one litigant after another is forced to fight the same battle, over the same unfair law, over and over again, at no small expense to themselves and to the people of Malta.

It’s time to change the channel on the bland, idiotic statements coming out of Muscat’s marketing team. Never mind those silly “kju” posters. It’s time for a dialogue on a real issue that is crying out for an effective remedy. Will the PN have the courage to stand up for what is right, and put an end to these real injustices, for once and for all?

Joseph’s Fair Society must be a take off from LBJ’s Great Society.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbZYs_BfrcM