MANILA, Philippines — The Philippine justice system is broken and no amount of censorship by the courts or anyone else can change this fact, Sen. Leila de Lima yesterday said.
De Lima said none of the necessary and urgent reforms on criminal law have been instituted because of people’s tendency to look at the accused as “no longer fully human and, therefore, are no longer worthy of full respect for their humanity and their rights.”
“Our criminal justice system is broken not just in the ‘how,’ but also as to ‘why.’ If it were a person, it is not only broken in body, it is broken in spirit. I would go so far as to say that it is lacking a soul,” she added.
“It moves, but never towards anything productive. It moves just for the sake of being able to say that it moves. A zombie in the legal world,” she said.
De Lima presented “Modernizing Criminal Law by Updating Our Approach to Criminal Behavior: Taking the Path of Transformative Justice,” through her deputy chief of staff Catherine Sy, during the Sixth Spanish-Filipino Scientific Congress at the University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City on June 10.
The event, titled “Sixth Spanish-Filipino Scientific Congress: Modernizing Criminal Law and Private Law,” gathered faculty, scholars, members of the Philippine judiciary and experts from European and Philippine universities to share knowledge about modernizing the country’s legal codes.
De Lima’s efforts to modernize the criminal justice system can be traced back to as early as 2011 when she was justice secretary.
She created an inter-agency criminal code committee to study, assess and consolidate a simple, updated enforcement and improve the administration of justice.
During her presentation, De Lima said that modernizing the law was one of the foremost priority legislative agendas of the Department of Justice under her leadership to be endorsed to the Senate and House of Representatives. This was eventually filed on Aug. 13, 2013 as House Bill 2300 during the 16th Congress by then congressman Niel Tupas Jr.
When she was elected senator in 2016, De Lima filed Senate Bill 1227 seeking repeal of the Revised Penal Code and proposed a measure that would replace it with Criminal Code of the Philippines to make it responsive and relevant to the country’s criminal justice system.
The measure seeks to ordain and institute a new Criminal Code that would modernize, update and codify the country’s basic penal law.
“When I became a senator, I had very, very high hopes that the foundation that we had laid down five years prior would evolve and come into fruition within the next six years, especially in light of the fact that I was initially given the chairmanship of the Senate committee on justice and human rights,” she said.
“I fully expected that my successor as chairman of the committee on justice and human rights would have given it due consideration. Unfortunately, we are both at the end of our terms as senator, and the bill is as far away from becoming a law as it was when it was first filed almost nine years ago,” she added.