Former chief justice Vincent De Gaetano appointed education ombudsman

Parliamentary Ombudsman Anthony C. Mifsud has appointed Chief Justice Emeritus Vincent A. De Gaetano to serve as Commissioner for Education. 

The commissioner is an autonomous Officers of Parliament with the same independence and security of tenure, working in the Ombudsman’s Office, independently of each other.

De Gaetano joined the Attorney General’s Office in 1979 and served as Deputy Attorney General from 1989 to 1994. In 1994 he was made a judge of the Superior Courts and in 2002 was appointed Chief Justice.

In 2010 he was elected to the European Court of Human Rights as the judge in respect of Malta, and served as vice-president of Section IV and later as president of Section III of that Court.

He retired from the court in Strasbourg in September 2019 after serving a full nine-year term.

In September 1988 he obtained his teacher’s warrant as a lecturer and later senior lecturer in Criminal Law and Law of Criminal Procedure at the University of Malta, and a regular member of the Faculty of Laws, from 1991 to 2017.

He has lectured and published extensively in Malta and abroad on legal and human rights topics.

In March 2020 he was nominated by the Chamber of Advocates to sit on the Committee of Advocates and Legal Procurators of the Commission for the Administration of Justice, and was elected chairperson of that committee by the other members.