Irish Bianca U.

Luna JD – 3
Atty. Yusoph Binsuan Criminal Justice System

Philippine’s State: Justice or Injustice System?

Most Filipinos know that there’s little to no justice to be had from our
criminal justice system. It is toothless and glacial. And its longtime failure is at
the root of broad acceptance of Pres. Duterte’s draconian drug war, which has
led to more than thousand confirmed deaths, with nearly thousand more
awaiting investigation. Like most institutions in this country, the systems of
law and order are thoroughly dysfunctional. The abuses can only ever be
rectified by addressing each in turn. But what if the mechanisms to do that are
so broken they’re nearly useless? Filipinos become so immune to these issues
to the point that they no longer notice how we are treated by the government.

It is in the failure of our Justice System to uphold the law that causes so
many problems and miseries in our country. Court decisions comes with a
price tag, on a snail-paced proceeding that only the rich can afford. Drugs,
corruption, inequality, human rights issues, all that could have been dealt by
the law, is what can no longer be controlled to become a habit these days.

Many accused, after being pressed for bribes and languishing in jail for
years, end up simply released after the police do not attend trials to testify, or
the prosecution is absent or the evidence proves flimsy. A part of our criminal
justice system has never been able to properly acquit the innocent and punish
the guilty. Corrective action, now operating extrajudicially, has become
subjective and reliant not on the judgment of institutions, with all their checks
and balances.

Citizens these days are targeted from drug watchlists compiled by local
community officials, whom the president now denounces as largely corrupt and
in need of replacement. Those lists, because they are confidential and
unverified, have cultivated a sense of impunity that has led to police abuses,
vigilante operations and thousands of killings. They’ve also left so many
Filipinos vulnerable to less lethal, but more pervasive, victimization.

Human rights lawyers say such systemic injustice can be addressed only
by reforming the judiciary, the penal system and the police together. But that
network must first be challenged, to prove that its dysfunction results in grave
consequences, and the only ones who can legally file cases are the abused
parties, most of whom are too poor and too scared to do so. This is according to
one opinion about injustices here in our country as reflected in New York
Times entitled the Injustice System.

Personally, as a law student, one of the issues that saddens me in this

journey is the fact that there are blatant law breakers which even come from
big positions in our very own country, yet it has become a habit for us to
Filipinos to pretend blind and not care because we do not have our voice, we do
not have the power, we do not have the privilege.

However, let us hope that at some point, it is steadily changing.

Whistleblowers from among police and vigilantes are speaking out, while
lawyers’ groups have been working on cases for victims of abuse or families of
those killed. This year, a group of claimants won an injunction from the
Supreme Court, which issued a restraining order against police officers alleged
to have shot four men execution style. Yet the trial is a long way off, and these
plaintiffs, and all others like them, receive no other protection from the
government. They live in fear.

With all of these, no one person is culpable however, just as no one

person can fix it. What is supposed to be a precision instrument for ensuring
law and order has become a weapon so blunt that most people can’t trust it.
The current embrace of violence, and all the justifications people make for it,
are predicated on this. The system is so broken that many Filipinos think it’s
just better to purge these toxicity of society. It’s a perverse hope — one that if
we’re honest we can all understand, but one that if we’re responsible, we must
ultimately reject.