Judges cited the AI tool Gemini in their ruling on Malta’s historic rent laws, showing that artificially intelligent chatbots are also used in the country’s judiciary.
A footnote to Judge Giovanni Grixti’s judgment this week states that calculations for Malta’s minimum wage in 1987 were “obtained from Gemini AI, which cited data from the NSO, the National Minimum Wage National Standards Order, and the newspapers Malta Independent and Malta Today.”
Although the University of Malta is experimenting with the use of AI tools to help adjudicate small claims court disputes, and the government is working with the Council of Europe to further digitize Malta’s court system, it is unusual for a judgment to refer to the use of a public AI chatbot.
Gemini is a publicly available AI chatbot developed by tech giant Google.
In December, UNESCO released guidelines for the use of AI in the judicial field, stating that AI “can help achieve faster and fairer justice, but it must always be rooted in human judgement.”
It is unclear whether the Maltese judiciary is subject to guidelines on the use of AI and whether members of the judiciary have received AI-specific training.
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The judge used Gemini’s calculations of Malta’s historic minimum wage in the process of rejecting an assessment made by a court-appointed expert of the rental value of the Baluta apartment at the time.
Experts calculated that in 1987 it would cost €12,379 per year to rent this property.
The judge expressed skepticism about this figure, asking how realistic it was to think that a landlord could easily find a tenant willing to pay almost four times the annual minimum wage for the average worker in 1987, when the average home purchase price at the time was €55,000.
The judgment was handed down in a lawsuit filed by Marcus Scicluna Marshall and Romina Scicluna Marshall against Annunziata Samut and the state court.
The Marshalls have launched legal action challenging the constitutionality of Malta’s compulsory tenancy laws following a years-long dispute over an apartment in the Balluta Building in St Julian’s.
Marshall’s mother leased the property in 1962 on a long-term 17-year contract. Before the lease expired, the Rent Act, passed in 1979, gave tenants the right to convert their occupancy rights to protected leases.
As a result, property owners received only 617.28 euros in rent per year until 2022, when the Rent Regulation Board increased the rent to 32,000 euros per year following changes to the Rent Law.
Tenant Annunziata Samut moved out of the property after receiving a rent increase. Nevertheless, the plaintiffs filed suit in court seeking a formal eviction order and damages for the long-standing rent cap.
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The court dismissed the request for an eviction order, noting that Mr Samut had already vacated the property and the eviction was ordered by the Rent Control Board, not the Constitutional Court.
The plaintiffs also pointed out that they had inherited real estate from their mother in 2019, and at that time, a legal reform allowing rent increases had already been enacted, and the court ruled that they would not be entitled to any compensation for psychological damages. Accordingly, the plaintiffs have not been personally infringed upon during their tenure as owners.
However, the court ordered the plaintiff to pay 53,114 euros in monetary damages to be paid by the state.
The figure was arrived at by court experts who calculated the rental value of properties for each five-year period going back to 1987 and ending in 2018.
The amount amounted to 115,136 euros, which was then subject to various deductions established by the European Court of Human Rights, resulting in a final total of 59,015 euros.
But the court, concerned about the reliability of the calculation, applied a 10 percent discount to that figure.
To calculate historical rental value, court professionals typically use a formal index to calculate the past sale value of a property and then set the rental value as between 3.5 percent and 4 percent of the property value.
The court said the calculation could not be established and cited the judge’s conclusions in a 2020 decision (Gerald Camilleri et al. v. l-Avukat Ġenerali et al.) to illustrate the point.
In its decision, the court stated, “In a truly open market, the price charged for goods and services (in this case rent) is not mathematically fixed at 3.5 to 4 percent, but is determined by supply and demand, and it is not certain that property owners will always find tenants who will pay 3.5 to 4 percent of the property price.”
