For the past several months, I have been experiencing the Maltese court system for the first time. I went in expecting what anyone expects from a courtroom: that the process would be about facts, evidence and fairness. What I found instead was a system where the language you speak can be turned into a weapon against you.Let me be clear about my own position. I have a Maltese surname. I have lived on this island for years, built companies here, raised my daughters here, represented Malta abroad. And I do not have full comprehension of Maltese, certainly not the rapid-fire, technical Maltese of a courtroom. So I did what the law entitles me to do: I requested that proceedings be conducted in English.Twice, opposing lawyers fought that request. The justification, delivered with a shrug meant to end the conversation: “Aħna f’Malta, nitkellmu bil-Malti.”We’re in Malta, we speak Maltese. Offered, without a flicker of irony, as an argument for why a man should not understand his own court case. It is the kind of logic that sounds profound over a kazin bar and embarrassing in a hall of justice.Except that is not what our Constitution says.What the law actually saysArticle 5 of the Constitution establishes Maltese as the national language, and both Maltese and English as the official languages of Malta. Yes, it makes Maltese the default language of the courts, but with an explicit proviso for Parliament to provide for English.Parliament did exactly that six decades ago, through the Judicial Proceedings (Use of English Language) Act, Chapter 189 of the Laws of Malta, in force since 1965.Here is the part every gatekeeper conveniently forgets. Cap. 189 does not define a “Maltese-speaking person” by surname, bloodline or years of residence. It defines one as a person with sufficient knowledge of the Maltese language to fully understand and follow the proceedings. Comprehension is the legal test. Nothing else.Where all parties are English-speaking, the court is required to conduct proceedings in English. The trouble arises in mixed cases, where the law demands the consent of the Maltese-speaking party before switching to English. Think about what that means in an adversarial system: the law hands one side a veto over whether the other side gets to fully understand their own case. And some lawyers have learned to use it exactly that way.Not a courtesy. A tactic.When a lawyer objects to English, knowing full well the opposing party cannot fully follow Maltese, that objection is rarely about national pride. It is about advantage. Get the other party nervous. Get them frustrated. Get them to miss a nuance, hesitate on the stand, misunderstand a question.What makes these objections absurd is this: every warranted advocate in Malta came through an education system that requires English at Advanced Level. You do not get a law degree on this island without it. So when a lawyer fights against proceedings being held in an official language of the Republic, a language he is academically certified to command, there are only two possibilities.Either he cannot actually litigate in English, which makes his objection a public admission of professional inadequacy, or he can, and is objecting purely as a power move.Incompetence or manipulation. There is no third option, and neither belongs in a courtroom.I will not name the lawyers who have done this in my own proceedings while those proceedings are ongoing. They know who they are. So do their colleagues.The most absurd version is more common than you would think: cases where the parties have known each other for years and communicated in English the entire time. Every conversation, every message, every disagreement, all in English, without a single issue of comprehension between them. Then they walk into a courtroom, and one side suddenly discovers a deep patriotic devotion to proceedings in Maltese.Uwejja mela.Nobody’s linguistic identity transforms at the door of the law courts. What transforms is the incentive, because withholding consent under Cap. 189 costs nothing and gains everything. A language two people genuinely shared for years becomes a weapon one of them is handed to use against the other. That is not culture. It is strategy wearing culture as a costume.The surname trapRecently, sitting in a courtroom waiting for my own case to be called, I watched the accommodation offered five separate times to foreign parties: proceedings in English, plus a court-provided translator. Five times, in one sitting. Our courts can apparently produce a translator faster than the courthouse kiosk produces a coffee.But walk into that same courtroom with a Maltese surname and imperfect Maltese, and something else happens. You are frowned upon, treated as somehow less Maltese, less legitimate, less deserving of comprehension. It is a reverse snobbery, often sharpest from lawyers whose own English would collapse under cross-examination.And before the lazy accusation arrives: none of this is anti-Maltese. I spent years writing comedy for Comedy Knights, jokes built in English that land on a Maltese punchline, because that is how this island actually speaks and laughs. Our courts, I have since discovered, prefer the reverse format: proceedings in Maltese, with the punchline on you. Loving the language of the punchline does not mean I can follow a magistrate’s ruling delivered at speed in legal Maltese. Understanding every word of proceedings that decide your life is not a privilege to be earned by passing a cultural purity test. It is a right.The numbers should end this debateAccording to the National Statistics Office, 96 per cent of Malta’s population has at least a basic knowledge of English. Only around nine in ten can say the same of Maltese.The 2021 Census counted more than one in five residents as foreign nationals, over 115,000 people. And among Maltese nationals themselves, nearly a quarter of children under ten now consider English their primary language from early childhood, rising to almost four in ten in Swieqi. These are Maltese children, with Maltese surnames, growing up Maltese, in English. In twenty years they will be the litigants, witnesses and accused standing in our courtrooms.The bench is not a bystanderEvery one of these objections requires a judge or magistrate to entertain it. When a member of the judiciary, faced with a party who has plainly said they cannot fully follow the proceedings, chooses tradition over comprehension, that is not neutrality. That is the bench putting its stamp on discrimination. The Constitution they swore to uphold names two official languages. A judiciary that enforces only half of Article 5 is not upholding the Constitution. It is editing it.A century ago, Lord Chief Justice Hewart gave us the principle that justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done. I would add: it must be understood as it is being done.Making proceedings harder and more opaque for English speakers does not protect the Maltese language. Maltese needs no protection from people asking to follow their own cases. What it does is line lawyers’ pockets, because confusion is billable, delay is billable, and a rattled opponent is worth money.So here is my question to you:How many of you have lived this? The objection, the eye-roll, the “aħna f’Malta” line, the slow realisation that your comprehension was never the court’s priority. In my conversations these past months I have heard the same story again and again, and the first step to fixing a broken mechanism is proving how many people it has broken.If this has happened to you, or to someone you love, I want to hear about it. Reach me on Instagram at @surwess or on LinkedIn (Wesley Ellul).The law already contains the answer: comprehension is the test. It is time our courtrooms applied it, and time the consent loophole that lets one party veto the other’s understanding was reformed.Aħna f’Malta. Nitkellmu bil-Malti. U nitkellmu bl-Ingliż ukoll. Our Constitution says so.Wesley Ellul is a Maltese-Canadian entrepreneur, creator of the Comedy Knights, and President and Co-Founder of Technotainment Streaming Media.Lovin Malta is open to interesting, compelling guest posts from third parties. These opinion pieces do not necessarily reflect the views of the company. Submit your piece at hello@lovinmalta.com•