Street legal | Michela Spiteri

Ever found yourself wasting the better part of a morning in the corridors of the law courts... only to be casually informed that your case has been deferred for the umpteenth time because one of the lawyers involved failed to show up (or some other, equally trivial pretext)?

Have you spent years awaiting the outcome of a case that keeps getting prolonged by excessively bureaucratic procedures, only to then spend just as many years awaiting the outcome of an equally lengthy and cumbersome appeal process?

Possibly you are one of several thousand citizens who have had close encounters of even more frustrating kinds with Malta's notoriously arcane and Byzantine judicial system. For instance, you were held in contempt of court because you wore the 'wrong' clothes to a hearing, or because you held your glasses the 'wrong' way or addressed the magistrate or judge using the 'wrong' title... or somehow fell foul of any of a dozen little rules and regulations that you never even knew existed and which are not actually explained anywhere at all.

If so, you will certainly not be alone in feeling frustrated, bewildered and possibly even frightened by the complexities of a system which often seems designed specifically to screw you over.

It was partly to address this widespread sense of disillusionment and despair that one lawyer - Michela Spiteri, 39, also a newspaper columnist - decided to try and shed some light on this harsh and often alien environment so many of us get lost in on a regular basis.

The result of her endeavour? 'Without Prejudice' - www.without-prejudice.org - a website which, in its own words, aims "to demystify the court process and make the justice system more user-friendly and the legal world a more comfortable place."

We meet for a drink at Tikka Bar in Pjazza Regina, Valletta, a veritable hive of lawyers, judges and magistrates which (as I discover to my horror) doesn't serve coffee. But it serves an unlikely combination of fresh cheeses, and between half a gbejna and some fossilized Stilton we compare notes about our respective court experiences.

"The idea came to me soon after I started writing in the newspapers around 2007," she begins. "Because law is my line anyway, and because I tend to fall back into my comfort zones when stuck for a topic, I found myself writing articles about legal issues more often than other things..."

The articles themselves often took a tongue-in-cheek look at some of the zanier and less immediately comprehensible aspects of her own life as a lawyer in Malta's traditionally chaotic court system. But it was the response to these articles that eventually prompted Spiteri to 'do something' about an increasingly forbidding environment.

"I started receiving feedback from readers about individual cases, including particular problems people encounter in the law-courts.

As much of her own experience involves the family court, Michela Spiteri often found herself focusing specifically on separation cases.

"Many of the emails I received came from men who were frustrated and who felt like the family court system was stacked against them: men who had lost their children because of a system that failed them."

Contrary to public perceptions about misogyny in the legal system, Spiteri found that the set-up at the family court very often seems stacked against men. And this situation is by no means limited to Malta alone.

One of the first emails she received came from a Maltese-American lawyer who had been through separation proceedings in the US - where he found himself accused of child abuse.

"I had no choice but to respond to allegations of being an abusive husband and father, allegations which were completely manufactured, as my [adult] children will attest today," he wrote. "I fault the court system for not taking the time to truly see what was going on and then intervening to put a stop to it. I also fault the attorneys who simply do their clients bidding, rather than letting them know how harmful their actions may be to their children."

Similar stories abound in Malta; and even in criminal or civil cases, people are often left to flounder in a sea of uncertainty.

"It dawned on me that there was a lot of hunger out there for more information... how the same general complaints featured regularly, yet nothing has ever been done to address the lack of information."

Examples include a positively draconian dress code, defiance of which can conceivably land you in contempt of court. Yet it was only very recently that a sign was finally put up in the law courts to explain the code for the benefit of people who are expected to abide by it 'or else.'

Until that time, it was generally assumed that all people would be automatically familiar with the do's and don'ts (for example, do wear a tie, don't wear stilettos), even if there was no way to actually familiarise oneself with the details at all.

This, Spiteri explains, is typical of many of the recurring problems that constantly undermine public faith in the system.

"Even judges and magistrates sometimes simply 'assume' that a defendant or plaintiff will know exactly what's expected of him or her in court... but this is not always the case at all. And it's not just the people from underprivileged backgrounds who are victims of this situation. Educated people, even people you'd expect to know a thing or two about court procedures, are very often completely unaware of how things actually work."

As a result, much of the feedback she received on her earlier articles was characterised by evident anger and frustration - and sometimes also fear.

"The law courts can be quite a daunting place," she adds. Apart from actual security concerns - including fights that occasionally flare up in the corridors and the inevitable bomb scares that so often derail the course of justice - the inexplicable complexity of the procedures themselves can actually scare people.

It is partly for this reason that Without Prejudice takes a consciously light-hearted approach to subject: as the website itself points out, "There's a misconception that law is dour and boring and that learning anything is hard work. There's a lot of hard work that goes into learning the law, but law can be fun and exciting once you know what's going on."

Admittedly, it doesn't look like much fun to be the bewildered person sitting in the dock as lawyers argue interminably among themselves, using absolutely unintelligible and inaccessible language, and, worse still, take decisions on your behalf without explaining what's actually going on.

"It would almost be comical if the consequences were not so serious," Spiteri says. "These procedures involve decisions which affect people's lives. People should at least have an idea of what is happening in their own cases."

And yet, while individual lawyers and even judges are often heard criticising specific aspects of the system, there has been little effort to address the more common complaints. Michela Spiteri cites an example involving the use of the witness list as a means to intimidate adversaries in court.

"Very often people will list as many witnesses as possible, not so much because their testimony will be pertinent to the case, but just to complicate matters for the other party."

The presiding judge or magistrate is technically within his or her rights to ask for a justification for citing a particular witness, but in Spiteri's experience this rarely, if ever, happens.

"If someone calls up 100 witnesses in a case, the courts will generally accept the list without asking any questions. This is one of the reasons why cases take so long."

Elsewhere archaic bureaucratic procedures have been retained, even if they make no sense in this day and age; and in some cases, the lawyers themselves will be unaware of their precise intricacies.

"Established lawyers tend to rely on legal procurators to get the spadework done... to file documents and so on. So they will not necessarily know the exact process involved."

As Spiteri herself has worked from the ground up since the beginning of her own legal career, she is perhaps in a better position to appreciate why court procedures often take so spectacularly long.

"Often it will just be a case of a single file having to go from one office to another to get this or that signature, so in practice, a simple judge's decree can sometimes take three days to be finalised."

Sometimes, she adds, the court will be perfectly right and its critics wrong; and this is another area where the website tries to address the dearth of public understanding of the system.

But despite widespread cognisance that the system is itself flawed and often short-changes the clients it exists to serve, Michela Spiteri's efforts to familiarise the public with this often hostile and alien landscape seem not to have attracted much attention from her colleagues. With the exception of one or two lawyer contributors, Without Prejudice seems to have been studiously ignored.

"I sometimes get the impression there is still an 'us and them' mentality among the legal profession; and while some lawyers do their utmost to explain cases to their clients, to be fair you can't always explain everything to everyone."

Still, lawyers as a whole sometimes give the impression that they prefer to retain a situation which keeps the wider public ignorant of the complexities of their arcane profession. It is difficult to escape the perception that a degree of 'secrecy' surrounding their practice ultimately benefits certain lawyers at the expense of their clients.

Bridging this gap is evidently one of Michela Spiteri's ultimate aims.

"This website intends to do just that. To educate people about the law and let them have fun in the process, even if it means poking fun at lawyers, judges and the system. A bit of (self-)deprecation never killed anyone."