Mother, premature son faced removal from hospital.. until law students turned up

In 2019, a Serbian woman was handed a removal order just one week after giving birth to her premature son at Mater Dei Hospital.

The child needed life-saving treatment and continuous medical care, and backed by medical staff and a team of law students, she challenged the removal order, remaining in hospital for two years to be with her son.

The students, supported by practising lawyers, made her case in front of the Maltese authorities and eventually obtained a residence permit for her, allowing mother and son to travel abroad for treatment.

The woman is one of dozens of people who has been provided free legal services through a law clinic set up in 2017 by the Chamber of Advocates and the University of Malta’s Faculty of Law.

The clinic is the brainchild of its director, David Zammit, who had started looking into introducing something of the sort over 15 years ago.

Partly hosted by the Cottonera Resource Centre, the clinic has seen some 242 student teams handle around 369 cases between 2017 and the beginning of this year. The clinic mainly deals with issues of migration, housing and family law, but also property, consumer, succession and criminal laws.

For each case, a team of...