Malabon, Navotas fiscals cope with rusty walls, dead fish

Here’s an arrangement that smells fishy.

The lack of office space has forced a group of state lawyers in Malabon and Navotas to conduct hearings inside rusty cargo container vans and even fish morgues.

"We are trying to do our job the best way we can under trying circumstances," Chief Prosecutor Jorge Catalan Jr. said while appealing to the national government to help give them more decent and spacious offices.

Catalan lamented that even the day-care center run by the Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) and the Malabon chapter of the Girls Scouts of the Philippines, both in the same area, are better off in terms of space and location.

"While we can get by with the present state of our offices, we would like to believe that President Arroyo will not think it an abuse if we cry for better structures that will house our offices and that of the courts," he said.

Catalan said he is appealing to the President for a new Hall of Justice to replace the one gutted by fire two years ago. The ruins of structure remain untouched to this day.

State prosecutors are under the government’s executive branch, particularly the Office of the President.

The two-story "building" built from old container vans lies in Barangay Catmon, Malabon City, in an area where the now-scrapped P122-million proposed new city hall would have risen. When it so much as drizzles, murky floodwaters rise to knee-deep levels.

"It even gets worse when the tides rush in," Catalan complained.

The lawyer, who at 45 is one of the youngest chief prosecutors in Metro Manila, at present holds office in the modestly furnished 40-foot container van donated by childhood friends at Barrio Matang-tubig, Barangay Obrero at the Manila-Caloocan boundary where he grew up.

However, his office has recently been furnished with air-conditioning and wall-to-wall carpeting, courtesy of the Department of Justice. The vans below Catalan’s "suite" serve as cramped offices for four other prosecutors and two support staff. With an average daily inquest in his area of responsibility ranging from 10 to 15 cases, one can only wonder how a prosecutor is able to perform his job respectably.

"If our requests, down to the most modest ones for supplies, are granted, this will go a long way in our mutual desire for effective, efficient public service," Catalan said.

On the other hand, the Navotas Prosecutor’s Office, which was similarly razed by fire, occupies a room in the second floor of the four-story building of the Fisheries Development Authority (PFDA) at the Navotas Fish Port Complex, where fish suspected of having been caught illegally (using explosives) are examined.

Catalan said he has made representations with Malabon-Navotas Rep. Ricky Sandoval to leave their current offices in Navotas. He said they offered the larger offices of the Land Transportation Office (LTO), which is set to vacate the same building at the end of the month.