The ghost of marriage past

Minister Tonio Borg does not seem to have realised that the people voted to introduce divorce, not something which is sort of like it. I say this because he proposed an amendment to the divorce bill which shows that he is still living in denial.

In brief, Minister Borg wants the divorce law to say that, in fault-based cases, after the couple has settled everything in court, signed on the dotted line and gone their separate ways once and for all, one of the parties would still enjoy a right of succession. So, if a couple obtains a divorce and the one who is considered to be at fault dies, say, 14 years later, the other party would enjoy an inheritance right.

This is bizarre legal thinking, rendered even more bizarre by the fact that it was floated by a deputy prime minister who also lectures in the Faculty of Laws. Just as we were the only country in the world without divorce (apart from the Philippines), the only one which introduced it via a referendum, Tonio Borg now wants us to be the only country in the world in which a dead marriage morbidly comes back to life the moment one of the parties dies.

Let us put an end to this obsession with being the world's oddballs. Divorce is the full and final settlement at law of a marriage which has irretrievably broken down. It is finally being introduced in Malta precisely so that there is a legal process in place, a process which terminates the contract once and for all. The rights and obligations of the parties are negotiated and perhaps fought over in the courtroom. But once the parties sign on the dotted line, that's it. The marriage no longer exists and neither of the parties can claim further rights.

Our deputy prime minister seems to be struggling to accept this simple concept. His amendment would have effectively meant that a marriage continues to have a ghostly, money-grabbing existence after divorce. And that ghost would have made its macabre reappearance on the day when the will of a dead man or woman is revealed to the potential heirs. Quite sick, if you ask me.

But don't worry, the deputy prime minister's amendment was shot down in parliament and will make no ghostly returns. As in Dickens' novel, even this one has a happy ending.