Judiciary’s facilities a cause for shame

It looks like Malacañang and the House of Congress are getting back at the Judiciary for striking down as unconstitutional the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) of legislators, the use of the Malampaya Fund and the President’s Social Fund for purposes not defined by law. Then the Supreme Court declared as void certain acts under the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP). Now, Congress is asking Supreme Court Justice Ma. Lourdes Serena to explain, in person,  how it spends the Judiciary Development Fund.

At first glance, the judiciary, which includes the Supreme Court, the lower courts, the Sandiganbayan, Court of Appeals and the Court of Tax Appeals looks like it’s brimming with funds. In 2011, the judiciary’s budget was P13.621 billion; this jumped in 2012 to P15.075 billion.

 In 2013, the judiciary’s budget was P17 billion, and for 2014, its budget increased to P18.56 billion.

But, as Associate Justice Marvic Mario Victor Leonen said before law students at the Ateneo School of Law, the increase — of P5 billion to the judiciary’s budget can be misleading.

He said that in the 2011 General Appropriations Act, the judiciary’s share in the national budget pie was only 0.84 percent, and the percentage increased slightly to 1.01 percent in 2012. In 2013, the percentage share dipped to 0.86 percent, and further went down to 0.82 percent in 2014.

Compare the judiciary’s budget of P18.56 billion and the pork barrel of lawmakers of P24 billion. “The alleged misuse of lawmakers of their pork barrel, said Leonen, is “the worst corruption scandal to hit the country in recent history.”

Whether the judiciary has misspent its budget has to be proven. But as what former Chief Justice Reynato Puno told me in an interview, the judiciary’s budget is too small to enable the system to meet the public’s expectations of justice being served. One quite shocking revelation of this truth is the poor state of disrepair of halls of justice.

Many of the courts — from Sulu to Manila — are in a sad state of disrepair. Having attended hearings in trial courts in Dasmarinas, Cavite, and in Manila, I’ve seen the terrible overcrowding of hot and humid halls, of the lack of facilities — not only of computers, but also of  electric fans, of filing cabinets, with documents piled on top of each other on wooden shelves. Not surprisingly, the toilets are dirty, some of them without water. Our court rooms are a cause for shame. If only the President and his cabinet members and legislators would visit them, they would run away with hands covering their noses.

If the government is concerned about rendering justice swiftly, and fairly, it should allocate more resources to the judiciary.

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I mourn the passing of a most impressive woman: Rose Lamb Sobrepeña. She was a beautiful person who drew and inspired friends with her advocacies and innate gifts.

Many of her friends have several plates, mugs and wine bottles that she painted with flowers; these are priceless treasures for us. She not only painted, she wrote poetry and family history books, and published  volumes on her town’s (Zamboanga) and people’s history, poems and observations.

Her books are fascinating. Characters & Circumstances are made up of funny and sentimental vignettes on close friends. Postmarked Manila talks of events during the period February 21, 1961 to January 16, 1996, and reads like a personal diary. As It Was, is her family’s history. Mariya Went to Town is an entertaining little volume on an old maid who cheerfully served the Sobrepena household for 40 years. And Life in Full Circle is a compilation of her poems, introduced by National Artist for Literature  Edith L. Tiempo, as living up to its title “because it announces the thematic idea of life-fullness, the idea weaving through all the poems . . . experiences, evoking both happiness and despair, triumph and defeat, blessing and deprivation.”

Rose’s good looks spring from a crossing of blood lines — Spanish, American and Filipino.   Her genealogy is written in As It Was. Her grandfather was Lt. Col. Angel Maldonado y Corona of Spain who assumed the governorship of the province of Lepanto in the north. In Lepanto he  met and married a Spanish lady, Rosario Corona y Molledo who gave him three sons – Angel, Antonio and Jose — whom the couple took back to Spain. The second son, Antonio,  returned to the Philippines in 1923 after his college studies, went to Zamboanga, where he met and married Antonina Lamb, second daughter of William Lee Lamb of the US Army, and wife Encarnacion Mandan, a Davaoena.

The Lambs’  older daughter, Josephine, born in 1901, married Antonio Maldonado, a Filipino citizen who opened the first department store in Zamboanga; they had two children – Angel and Rosario. Antonio died while defending his honor in a skirmish.  Grandfather William Lee Lamb legally adopted his two Maldonado grandchildren, and named them Andy and Rose Lamb.

Grandpa William was a strict guardian, controlling the life of his widowed daughter Josephine, who, to his disappointment, remarried, this time a company employee.

The eye-catching Rose was sent to Silliman University in Dumaguete City for her college studies.  In her junior year, she met Enrique “Ike” Sobrepeña, one of her many suitors (men of high positions had proposed marriage to her when she was only 17 years old), and married him in ceremonies which her grandfather did not attend on account of the wedding preparations having been made without his knowledge. Ike was a  tall, bespectacled commerce student. He is the eldest of four children of the late United Church of Christ in the Philippines Bishop Enrique Sobrepeña of Caba, La Union, and Petra Aguinaldo, a nurse from Ilocos Norte.

  Ike had been a devoted husband; the couple travelled often, their good looks catching everyone’s attention. One of Ike’s gifts to his wife was his financing, and dedicating a creative writing center  in her honor. The Mary Rose Lamb Sobrepena Writers Village is the venue  for the Silliman University National Writers Workshop which was founded by Drs. Edilberto and Edith Tiempo in 1961. The writers’ village project, located on a hilltop of Bongbong,  in Valencia, Negros Oriental (a few kilometers away from Dumaguete City), was initiated by Silliman President Dr. Ben S. Malayang III, as part of a long tradition of gifs to the university from the Sobrepeñas, avid patrons of the arts. His contributions to Silliman won him the 1973 Outstanding Sillimanian Award in the field of business. 

  One  of Rose’s friends educator Flor Rosario Braid, wrote in her column that EVP Bobby Café of College Assurance Plan  described Rose as a “renaissance man,”  a multi-skilled and multi-talented person.   Rose’s greatest legacy, Flor wrote, is the CAP College for the Deaf, an offshoot of the Southeast Asia Institute for the Deaf which was born in the compound of their residence in 1974.  Starting with only five students and initially operating on the grade level, it is now a full college which has graduated hundreds of students majoring in various disciplines.

  Goodbye, Rose, a beautiful friend.

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