Adoption and its effects under Maltese law

Abstract

In this dissertation I have tried my best to make use of my practical experience of the subject and to focus attention on the particular factual problems presently facing would-be adopters and even the court itself, and on the short-comings of the law in dealing with them. This personal insight was supplemented by a meticulous research into the adoption records of the last ten years, the fruit of which is represented by the ten different statistical tables included in the Appendix to this thesis, to which reference is often made to substantiate certain passages in this work. Of course, this statistical data could also be of value to social workers, sociologists and the legislator himself in planning future legal reforms. It also brings out perhaps how, and to what extent, the institute of adoption in Malta has been affected by the amendments to the 1962 Ordinance, especially those of 1972 and 1977. It will be noticed that the ‘comparative law’ aspect of this thesis is mostly concentrated on the detailed recommendations of the 1972 Houghton Committee Report in England and on the important legal reforms carried out in France in 1968. This was, of course, dictated by the fact that our Ordinance XXI of 1962 was to a large extent modelled on the 1958 English Adoption Act, while our pre-1962 law on adoption had been largely influenced by the French ‘Code Napoléon’. However, our present law is furthermore compared not only to that in force prior to the enactment of the 1962 Ordinance but also to the fundamental principles enunciated in the 1967 European Convention on the Adoption of Children, of which Malta was one of the original signatories. All this, of course, highlights not only the weaknesses of our law but also its strong points.