ONLY the deranged would hail a person to court and spend money, effort, and time to pursue a baseless suit, not to mention the emotional stresses the suitor of the law has to endure.

The normal persons, who presumably comprise the majority of the population, go to court as a last resort so that the wrong done to them will be vindicated. The other route to justice is not justice at all; it is more of a vendetta that has no place in the civilized world. The framers of the 1987 Constitution, and all other constitutions that preceded it, see to it that the courts should be accessible. Article III, Section 11 states: "Free access to the courts and quasi-judicial bodies and adequate legal assistance shall not be denied to any person by reason of poverty."

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You make the courts inaccessible to Juan de la Cruz, people will take the law into their hands. Once the court becomes inaccessible, you expect the breakdown of law and order.

Sadly, the Supreme Court, in trying to improve the condition of our judges, and due to tight budget in the annual General Appropriations Act, has increased a thousand-fold the filing fees. I had a client who owned a small farm. He contracted a loan to finance the farm. He planted tomatoes. But the adjoining plantation practiced aerial spraying. All his tomatoes were destroyed because of that. He wanted to file a lawsuit against the big plantation owner. He has to pay his lawyer. But there is no problem with that because payment can be made on installments. But when the complaint was prepared and the filing fee computed by the court, the filing fee was close to P50,000, and the payment has to be made in cash. With P2 million loan and damaged crops from which loan payments were expected to be taken from, how could he now pay the staggering filing fee? Contract another loan to pay the filing fee? In a justice system that grinds too slow, it is bad investment to borrow money to finance the filing fee and expect the award of damages to repay the loan. The greying hairs may start to fall before the case may be decided with finality. But the court allows the filing fee of cases free by the indigents. But look who qualifies as indigent?

In the case of Algura versus the Local Government of Naga, the Supreme Court ruled: "When an application to litigate as an indigent litigant is filed, the court shall scrutinize the affidavits and supporting documents submitted by the applicant to determine if the applicant complies with the income and property standards prescribed in the present Section 19 of Rule 141-that is, the applicant's gross income and that of the applicant's immediate family do not exceed an amount double the monthly minimum wage of an employee; and the applicant does not own real property with a fair market value of more than Three Hundred Thousand Pesos (P300,000). If the trial court finds that the applicant meets the income and property requirements, the authority to litigate as indigent litigant is automatically granted and the grant is a matter of right."

With the stringent requirements on indigent litigants, the constitutional mandate for free access to the court is negated. How many litigants can qualify as indigent litigants? In the case of my client, he could not qualify. But where should he get the money for filing fees? Sell his farm?

When the Supreme Court implemented the increase in filing fees, it did so out of the need to survive. The fund for the increase of salary of judges is taken from the collected filing fees. Before the salary increase of judges, many courts were vacant. Without the salary increase, courts would have been long deserted.

Congress and the Executive should now take the initiative. Tightening the budget of the Judiciary does not speak well of its public pronouncements. A pie of the pork barrel could have been channeled to the courts. The president could have simply slashed her almost P2 billion expenses in foreign trips and instead allocate the money to the justice system.

As a nation, we can survive with defective roads funded by the pork barrel. But without free access to the courts, we are tempting people to go by the dictum: "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."

That would make us less civilized than what we are now.

[E-mail comments to tiburciopalasan@palasanlaw.com]