A judge has cited AI tool Gemini in a ruling about Malta’s historic rent laws, indicating that artificial intelligence chatbots are also being leveraged by the country’s judiciary.
A footnote in a judgment issued this week by Judge Giovanni Grixti states that calculations about Malta’s minimum wage back in 1987 was “obtained from Gemini AI, which cited data from the NSO and National Minimum Wage National Standard Order, and newspapers The Malta Independent and Malta Today.”
While the University of Malta has run experiments on using AI tools to help adjudicate small claims tribunal disputes and the government is working with the Council of Europe to further digitise Malta’s court system, it is unusual for a judgment to cite the use of a public AI chatbot.
Gemini is a publicly available AI chatbot developed by tech behemoth Google.
In December, UNESCO launched guidelines for the use of AI by the judiciary, saying it “can help deliver justice faster and more equitably, but it must always be anchored in human judgment”.
It is unclear whether Malta’s judiciary is subject to any guidelines regarding the use of AI, or if members of the judiciary have received AI-specific training.
The case
The judge used Gemini’s calculation of Malta’s historic minimum wage in the process of dismissing the valuation a court-appointed expert made about a Balluta apartment’s rental value back then.
The expert had calculated that the property would have cost €12,379 a year to rent in 1987.
The judge expressed scepticism about that figure, asking how realistic it was to assume that a landlord in 1987 could easily find a tenant willing to pay nearly four times the average worker’s annual minimum wage for rent, when the average house purchase price at the time stood at €55,000.
The ruling came in a suit filed by Marcus Scicluna Marshall and Romina Scicluna Marshall against Annunziata Sammut and the State Advocate.
The Marshalls filed the case to challenge the constitutionality of Malta’s forced lease laws, following a years-long dispute over an apartment at Balluta Buildings in St Julian’s.
The Marshall’s mother leased the property out on a 17-year emphyteutis back in 1962. A rent law passed in 1979, before that lease expired, entitled the tenant to convert the occupancy into a protected lease.
As a result, the property owners received just €617.28 in rent every year for the property until 2022, when a rent regulation board raised that to €32,000 a year following a reform to rent laws.
The tenant, Annunziata Sammut, moved out of the property following that rent hike. The plaintiffs nevertheless sued in court, seeking a formal eviction order and damages for the years of capped rent.
The judgment
The court dismissed their request for an eviction order, noting that Sammut had already vacated the property and that evictions were ordered by the rent regulation board, not the constitutional court.
It also awarded zero moral damages, noting that the plaintiffs had inherited the property from their mother in 2019, when legislative amendments allowing them to increase the rent were already in force. The plaintiffs had therefore not suffered a rights breach personally during their tenure as owners.
The court, however, awarded the plaintiffs €53,114 in pecuniary damages, to be paid by the State.
It arrived at that figure on the basis of the court expert’s calculation of the property’s rental value back in 1987 and at each five-year interval from then until 2018.
That amounted to €115,136, which was then subject to various deductions established by the European Court of Human Rights, bringing the final total to €59,015.
The court, however, applied a 10 per cent discount to that figure, due to its concerns about the reliability of the calculation.
To calculate historic rental values, court experts generally calculate a property’s historic sale value using official indices and then establish rent value as being between 3.5 per cent and 4 per cent of the property’s value.
The court said that calculation could not be set in stone, and cited a judge’s conclusions in a 2020 ruling (Gerald Camilleri et v. l-Avukat Ġenerali et) to make that point.
In that ruling, the court had said “In a truly open market, the price charged for an object or service – in this case, rent – is not mathematically fixed at between 3.5 and 4 per cent, but depends on demand and supply, and it is not set in stone that a property owner will always find a tenant paying between 3.5 and 4 per cent of the property’s value.”