Honeyman: The community and the judicial branch

Monday, January 9, 2012

Impeachment

NEXT week sees the commencement of the impeachment trial of Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona. Representative Niel Tupas Jr. and his colleagues will attempt to convince the Senate as to the validity of their impeachment complaint and Corona’s camp will similarly try to persuade Senate that it is in the public interest that Corona remains as Chief Justice.

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Constitutionally, there are no constraints on the Senators as to the criteria they use to arrive at their decision. They listen to prosecution and the defense and they then make up their minds. To prevail, the prosecution needs the votes of 16 Senators.
Del Castillo

We are not in favor of Del Castillo’s impeachment. His alleged offense, plagiarism, may be more or less serious depending on the circumstances.

For example if I, as a scientist, steal a colleague’s laboratory notes and use these to claim a discovery that he, not I, made, then this plagiarism constitutes a serious and prosecutable offense.

But if I write: ‘Raul Roco was the noblest Filipino of them all,’ this is not plagiarism. The Shakespearean allusion is permissible.

Del Castillo occupies a middle ground. He copied words, without attribution, and he should not have done this. He also used the pilfered words to support a cause opposite from the intentions of the original author. Not good but not, in my opinion, impeachable.

The more serious offense, but also not, I believe, impeachable, was committed by the Supreme Court (SC) by issuing a self-important and hostile ‘show cause’ order to the Law Professors who drew attention to del Castillo’s lack of originality. Self-importance is unpleasant but surely not impeachable. Not yet, anyway.

Hubris

Whatever the outcome of the Corona impeachment case, we believe that the SC will never be quite the same again. Impeachment destroys the notion, apparently taught in some law schools, that ‘the SC may not always be right, but it is never wrong.’ The community, through its elected representatives, rejects such silliness.

What do we want from the judicial branch?

We refer to the framework put forward by Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales which I quoted in my 19 December 2011 article and which I repeat here. This framework identifies the justice system comprising of five pillars, namely: the community, the enforcement agencies, the counseling services provided by the Department of Justice and the Public Attorney’s office, the trial courts and the penal and correctional system.

Morales criticizes the way in which the system currently operates. Specifically, she is concerned that the pillars do not interact productively. She states ‘that there are disturbing reports of corruption, abuse or incompetence by members of the different pillars of the justice system and these reports may unduly result in the erosion of trust in the system. Unless we address them, questions about the integrity of the system will haunt us. Corruption is the true enemy.’

We agree. In the context of the current focus on the Judicial Branch, we assert that the interaction between the community and the trial courts is thoroughly unsatisfactory. Until and unless the Judicial Branch can mend its ways and operate cohesively with the community, it will always be considered as the weakest of the three branches of government. This is because we, the community, do not ascribe significant added-value to the trial court system.

Example. Over the past few years, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Filipinos have been cheated by various financial institutions: pre-need companies, the insurance sector, and banks. The trial court system has failed to make an effective contribution to the overall justice system to prevent the community from being cheated.

Not only is the trial court system ineffective in ensuring that the community receives justice, it consistently takes the side of the financial institutions against the community. This is contrary to the tenets of fairness that a properly functioning justice system would display.

Example

Examples of the community being cheated by the financial sector are in various pre-need schemes. The financial institution takes clients’ money for various plans such as academic or pensions. Then the institution goes to the Regional Trial Courts (RTC) to change the way the funds are deployed – typically stocks and bonds into property. The RTC agrees to the change. The next step is for the institutions to again go back to the RTC with a sob story such as ‘while all efforts have been exerted, the projected income growth of the Trust Fund has not been realized and cannot be recovered in time to settle maturing obligations.’ The RTC then blithely allows the institution to liquefy its assets and give out crumbs to the victimized plan holders.

The community is cheated by the institution and the RTC is, at best, a complacent bystander. At worst, corruption has been involved.
Results of impeachment

The Senate will decide whether Corona can keep his job or will be fired. Either way, we hope that the Judicial Branch will understand that it is held in low esteem by the community and that there needs to be a paradigm shift in the way it operates.

What can the judicial branch do?

It can recognize the Ombudsman’s structure of the Justice system and also see that it is a pillar of justice system which should interact more productively with the other pillars.