Injust-tiis system

In an effort to better understand why the Philippine Justice system is such a mess and so slow, we dedicated an entire week of AGENDA to interviewing the key stakeholders involved in the process and the system. We started out with members of the academe, a former congressman, the court administrator of the Philippines, lawyers, law enforcement officers etc. What I quickly found out was that one-hour everyday for a week was not enough. Maybe five whole days, and still that would not be enough.

We discovered that the first reason the Philippine Justice system is a mess is because we have a bastardized copycat system that in principle violates the separation of powers of the Executive, Legislative and Judiciary. Our current system is copied from the US court system minus a key element of the original; we took out jurors or the jury system where court cases are tried “before a jury of our own peers” or equals. Instead, judges do all the work. Even Moses was told by his father-in-law Jethro that he could not perform such a task by himself! What has ruined the system in part is the fact that courts are created by members of Congress based on their appreciation of the need or the advantage to be gained therein. Courts are not necessarily put up based on the recommendation of the Judiciary or the court administrator. In fact, the court administrator or representative from the Supreme Court is only called upon by Congress to “confirm” or verify the need or logic of putting up a court in a congressional district. As a result, some courts exist where there is barely a need and there are areas where courts are badly needed but not given.

Just because a congressman, or congresswoman legislates for the establishment of a court, it does not automatically translate into instant solutions. Budgets or funds don’t automatically drop from the sky. It takes approximately two years to get funding to the new court because the funds have to be included in a budgetary request by the Judiciary, approved by Congress and released to the Department of Budget and Management the following year. Actual release of course will be subject to the sense of urgency or priorities of the DBM. This budgetary upper hand of Congress and the Executive department has been used in the past to pressure if not force the Judiciary into political submission to Presidents and Congress in the past. “He who has the gold makes the rules”.

After courts are created by law they subsequently need Judges and staff to operate in them. Again, it is the Executive department, specifically the President assisted by the Judicial and Bar Council and a secondary screening committee who selects and appoints judges and justices. Although the court administrator is in charge of all courts in the country, he has no say and very little influence or opportunity to participate or join in the selection of judges. If we truly want an independent and professional justice system, members of Congress have to take a radical stand and remove this power or responsibility from the President because again it violates the separation of powers.

In addition to this, facts bear out that this situation is the number one reason why many courts have no judges. The Office of the President, both past and present, has been too slow in filling up the vacancies primarily because the process has been politicized. They either want to give the posts to supporters or want to appoint people aligned with the administration. This set up has also become a serious concern in terms of corruption because many aspirants who don’t have connections will ultimately go to brokers or influence peddlers.

Aside from the serious lack of courts and judges, we learned that many judges are overwhelmed with the case loads and are short of researchers and lawyers who are vital in reviewing cases submitted by fiscals or prosecutors. It is humanly impossible for judges to do all the study, review, appreciation and decisions on cases. Now that the Supreme Court has revived and mandated a “continuous trial” policy, several guests shared that many judges have opted for early retirement before the overload kills them!

After all that, we focused on lawyers and since the profession has been suffering from a bad reputation lately, we inquired if law schools actually included values formation, integrity training etc. on their curriculum? We found out that on the average most law schools only required two units of value or ethics subjects. Everything else is about the laws of the land, conducting business with the courts and lawyering skills. There are approximately 60,000 lawyers in the Philippines but only 20,000 work within the courts. The rest are based in corporations or government agencies. The sad part is in spite of the outcry of the poor and disadvantaged, there has been no voluntary effort from the thousands of lawyers to represent even one case per year pro bono. Yes, some lawyers do a lot of pro bono work such as Free Legal Assistance Group or the Integrated Bar of the Philippines free legal aid program, but imagine what an impact 20,000 or 60,000 lawyers could make in our Justiis system as well as improving the “nasty” reputation of lawyers!

Sadly, the IBP membership has not been proactive enough to even monitor the performance or win-ability of lawyers based on actual statistics in order to determine who are the best, the brightest and the worst in the profession. Everybody views it as politically incorrect or “unfair.” The thing is, given that lawyers can charge acceptance fees that go from 30K to millions, when clients can lose property, companies or liberty due to misrepresentation or incompetence, I think the IBP and lawyers owe it to the public to tell us what we are getting for our money.

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