Malta with 102 human rights violations per million people

Malta has a rate of 102 human rights violations per million people, according to judgments handed down at the European Court of Human Rights, which was established in 1959. 

Making comparisons, Slovenia has 148 violations per million people, Bulgaria 68 per million and Greece 67 violations per million people, but these countries did not all ratify the necessary instruments of the European Convention on Human Rights in the same years. 

Malta has faced 61 judgments at the ECHR since the European Convention on Human Rights was enshrined in Maltese law in 1987, with the large majority of these cases (43) ruling at least one rights violation against Malta.

Most of the 61 judgments were related to rights to liberty and security (16), rights to protection of property (13), rights to a fair trial (9), and rights to a fair length in court proceedings (9). 

The Strasbourg court dealt with 40 applications relating to Malta in 2014, of which 32 were declared inadmissible or struck out. It delivered four judgments (concerning the remaining eight applications), three of which found at least one violation of the European Convention on Human Rights. 

One of these three recent rulings fined the Maltese government €76,000 for having failed to protect ship repair workers from exposure to asbestos at the workplace between the 1950s and the early 2000s, leading them to develop asbestos-related health conditions.

Another fined the government €445,000 in damages for having failed to compensate a landowner for the expropriation of a portion of his Msida land in 1974. The third ruling fined the government €21,500 for having breached a landlord’s right to enjoy his apartment, by forcing him to rent it out at a miserly rate to the same tenants through the application of a 1979 law that converted temporary leases into permanent rental contracts.

The single non-violation ruling last year concerns Strasbourg’s decision that an antiques collector’s right to be presumed innocent was not breached when a court had ordered him to pay damages to the original owners of stolen goods he had received. 

Since it was set up, the court in Strasbourg has decided on the examination of around 627,500 applications but in recent years the ECHR has concentrated on examining complex cases and has decided to join certain applications which raise similar legal questions so that it can consider them jointly. 

More than 42% of the violations found by the ECHR concern Article 6 of the Convention, whether on account of the fairness or the length of  proceedings. 

The second violation most frequently found by the Court has concerned the peaceful enjoyment of possessions while 14% of the violations found by the court have concerned the right to life or the prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment.