Tenant denied protection rights seeks Constitutional redress

An aggrieved tenant this morning field an application at the Constitutional Court demanding that the Court re-examines his case and amends judgement which denied him the protection of Article 12 of the House Decontrol Act.

On 31 January this year, the Constitutional Court upheld a judgement delivered by the Civil Court ruling that, in view of Article 12A of the House Decontrol Act, could not be applied by tenants to keep the owners of an apartment in St Julian’s from ordering tenant Philip Grima to vacate the premises.

Grima felt aggrieved by this decision and filed a Constitutional case demanding the case be re-examined. In 2009, the European Court of Justice had decreed that it had established that owners did not have an effective remedy enabling them to evict tenants, either on the basis of their own need or otherwise.

The application of the law itself lacked adequate procedural safeguards aimed at achieving a balance between the interests of the tenants and those of the owners, hence the law itself breached the owner’s rights. However the law was not amended.

The applicant argued that in its judgement of an identical case, the Constitutional Court ruled that tenants could not apply Article 12A against any form of argument put forward by the owners demanding their eviction. “Further more the court cannot declare itself in a way that could lead to a possible eviction, when the law protects the tenants. The balance between tenants and owners should be regulated by the Government and it is the Government who has to pay if it fails in this”, the first court had said.

However in ruling over the case of Philip Grima, the same court applied a different reasoning and ruled that tenants could not call for the protection provided in Article 12A of the House Decontrol Act as this violated the rights of the actual owners.

“While the principle of binding precedent is not applied in Malta, these two cases were of Constitutional nature. In the first case, the court placed the burden of Article 12 on the State, so why did the court now put the burden on the tenant? What were the tenant’s actions that brought any sort of imbalance between his rights and those of the owners’?” the application read.

Lawyer Joe Brincat and legal procurator Peter Sammut signed the application.