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SOMEWHERE in this issue there’s a story of Chief Justice
Reynato Puno making the pitch for mediated justice, or
justice that’s amicably settled at the barangay level.
Those
familiar with his brand of an activist judiciary, and
his passionate advocacy of judicial reforms, would
easily find these resonating clearly in his speech on
Wednesday in
Davao, when he said that the oft-taken-for-granted
village-level justice system is important because it
“could be the only justice that the poor can access in
their entire lifetime.”
The
Chief Justice was criticizing the “adversarial justice
system” prevailing in the country, which he described as
“based on a culture of combat . . . that is ran by [a]
complicated system of rules where parties who can afford
high-priced lawyers will have the advantage over parties
who cannot afford it.”
The
barangay justice system, he told the Second Conference
of Barangay Justice Advocates of the Autonomous Region
in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), “is the most accessible to
the marginalized sectors of our society,” and thus it is
critical to strengthen the justice system at this
grassroots level, rather than what is happening now—most
reforms and, more important, the resources, are focused
on the more formal justice system.
“There’s
no doubt about it. The barangay justice system is in the
optimal position to address community-based conflicts
more effectively [than the regular courts],” said Mr.
Puno.
Easy to
see why that is so: if the barangay justice system is
effective, an overwhelming percentage of the conflicts
that reach the formal criminal justice system could be
effectively filtered out. This means easing the strain
on the various pillars of the system, all equally
cash-strapped and undermanned: the police and the
prisons system (whether we’re talking of detention areas
in police stations, the municipal, city and provincial
jails or the national prisons for convicts); social
services for minors and special groups of offenders and
victims; the overburdened prosecutorial service; and, of
course, the courts, which have been trying to beat back
the flood of cases the past few decades and
experimenting with ways to clear their backlogs. Sure,
some reforms have yielded gains through the years,
starting from the time of Hilario Davide—a combination
of modern technology, better funding, and a system of
rewards and punishment for court personnel have eased
the backlog and fast-tracked cases. Yet, on the whole,
no one can deny, the wheels of justice still grind too
slowly.
Flashback to the ’70s: the village justice system was
established through Presidential Proclamation 1508
issued in 1976 by then-President Ferdinand Marcos.
The law,
called the Katarungang Pambarangay, “established a
system of amicably settling disputes at the barangay
level.”
Perhaps
partly because it was an initiative of a dictator,
people thought little of the worthy objectives of
Proclamation 1508, inured as Filipinos were for decades
to the adversarial system of justice that was a template
of the American legal system.
And yet,
as Chief Justice Puno puts it, the barangay justice
system was a major alternative program that helped the
judiciary unclog its dockets.
He
offers data to prove his point: in 2004, the combined
contribution of the mediation and arbitration activities
resolved 27,094 cases of the 67,232 cases filed in the
courts.
Some
people with a bias for courtroom confrontations may
sneer at this initiative, but the point is that anything
that helps speed up—without jeopardizing fairness—the
process of getting justice in this country deserves
support. This imperative becomes weightier these days,
when all sorts of “eruptions”—whether from rebel
soldiers, communist and Muslim insurgents, or from plain
folk, like dispossessed farmers—keep surfacing just when
efforts to drive the economy are starting to gain
ground.
This
theme of slow justice is like one bad monkey on the
nation’s back: whether we’re talking of ordinary crime
victims; farmers appealing cases to agrarian-reform
bodies; families of the disappeared—like Jonas
Burgos—that are strung along indefinitely by the
military in their cases in court; or even of rebel
soldiers who joined then Lt. Senior Grade Antonio
Trillanes IV in 2003 because they were so outraged by,
among others things, the corruption of officers while
foot soldiers got butchered in the South.
Far from
endorsing Trillanes’s latest method for extracting
justice from a slow system, the point is that if justice
were only dispensed more quickly, then people would have
no reason to resort to extralegal means. In Trillanes’s
case, a quick resolution of both his Oakwood culpability
and the issue of whether or not he can actively serve as
senator would have taken away the martyr rug on which he
stood.
There is
reason, therefore, to support initiatives such as that
which Chief Justice Puno graced with his presence and
keen insights in Davao City this week.
The
conference of barangay justice advocates was the second
annual gathering of volunteer mediators, which also
included the barangay chairmen as the mandated authority
to mediate and amicably settle cases in their
communities.
The
program of building up the network of volunteer
mediators has been expanded in recent years to the ARMM
from
Panay island, where its first seeds were planted by the Roxas
family foundation.
The ARMM
is wracked by family and clan conflict and insurgency
war. Sulu, especially, has been a thorn in the Supreme
Court’s side, because for the longest time, its salas
have lacked judges, forcing cases to be transferred
elsewhere to everybody’s inconvenience and heightening
the risks to victims and witnesses.
When he
guested at the Quijano de Manila Symposium two months
ago, Chief Justice Puno acknowledged the difficulty of
resolving the “judge-less” courts, but assured the
public that steady progress was being made and that,
hopefully, in three years, there would no longer be such
spectacles.
Meantime, it would be well to heed Mr. Puno’s reminder:
for most ordinary folk, the barangay system is the
closest they can get to in their lifetime. It would take
so little, yet accomplish so much, to strengthen it. |
