High hopes

A happy New Year to all! It’s an election year, so politicians will be spreading cheer all around, well beyond the season’s other gift-giving day besides Christmas, the Feast of the Three Kings.

Billboards and streamers of the most shameless premature campaigners and epals took away some of the holiday cheer in many areas. The Supreme Court, in one of its more notoriously bizarre rulings, has effectively declared that there is no such thing as premature campaigning in this country. But despite that insult to our intelligence, Pinoy voters know exactly what it means.

Voter turnout during general and midterm elections in our country has always been high. Clearly, we have an abiding belief that elections are the ultimate manifestation of people power in a democracy.

Sadly, the reality is that elections have become mere vehicles for affirming the corrupt status quo and dynasty building.

Election campaigns provide the perfect machinery for money laundering. How many notorious jueteng barons, drug dealers and smugglers have successfully entered politics? They haven’t even bothered to dump their illegal activities. In fact the opposite has happened: they use their political power to protect their lucrative criminal rackets.

That fight over the Road User’s Tax, “insertions” and “parking” of funds for lawmakers, which has given us a graft-prone reenacted national budget for the first time since the election year of 2010, is partly fueled by the need to raise campaign funds. Lawmakers need control over public funds so they can dispense patronage at taxpayers’ expense.

Our system allows even convicts to seek public office and remain free, as long as the conviction is not yet final – a process that could take 20 years. So taxpayers must continue bearing the cost of keeping convicted thieves, rapists and other lowlifes in office, including their expenses for overseas junkets, business class airfare wherever they go, gasoline and bodyguards not just for themselves but also for their families, mistresses and children with the mistresses.

Even when convicted with finality, they are pardoned immediately by fellow crooks.

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In a new year, any administration that wants to eradicate corruption must include electoral reforms in the priority legislative agenda.

This may seem impossible to swing in a Congress whose members are overwhelmingly focused on self-interest. But President Duterte can draw on his still considerably high approval ratings to persuade his congressional allies to support his reform agenda. He keeps saying he’s tired of the presidency and does not intend to stay a moment longer than his term. So he can afford to push for reforms that are unpopular with lawmakers but supported by the public.

And to the extent possible for any administration that genuinely respects the independence of the judiciary, the executive must also push for judicial reforms.

Even in fighting the drug menace – always an ugly war – the certainty of punishment under the law has to be a more effective deterrent than any whimsical exercise of extrajudicial scare tactics. Consider the extent of the drug problem in countries where the rule of law prevails such as Japan, Singapore and South Korea.

An efficient judiciary also enhances law enforcement. Why do drug suspects get fatally shot ostensibly while trying to escape, or when they try to grab an arresting officer’s gun (even when the suspect is handcuffed)?

Among the reasons is that it’s too much trouble for the arresting officers to keep appearing before state prosecutors and then in court to pursue the conviction of the suspect – a process that could drag on for 25 years.

And if the suspect is a notorious drug kingpin with a mountain of dirty money to buy justice, he might never set foot on a jail cell. A crooked judge could allow bail and even the drug dealer’s departure for abroad. And there goes all the toil and risk to life and limb of the anti-narcotics cop.

At the start of 2019, Chief Justice Lucas Bersamin has reportedly ordered a “purge” of “misfits and scalawags” in the judiciary, starting in his home province of Abra. It’s a laudable move although it could decimate the judiciary. And unfortunately, one of the most notorious “hoodlums in robes” has already retired… from the Supreme Court.

That’s what trial court judges might tell the CJ: he should look in his own backyard.

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The chief justice we’ll never have, Antonio Carpio, says reforms continue to be implemented in the judiciary to cut delays in court hearings and speed up adjudication.

In line with a 2017 Supreme Court circular for continuous trial, meant to improve the implementation of the Speedy Trial Act of 1998 or Republic Act 8493, it took a mere six months for Judge Rodolfo Azucena Jr. of the Caloocan City Regional Trial Court Branch 125 to resolve the murder case against the policemen who executed teenage student Kian Lloyd delos Santos. That speedy trial was one of the brightest spots in 2018.

Aside from speeding up adjudication and consequently reducing opportunities for payoffs, however, there must be ways of putting an end to justice for sale.

The Supreme Court, it seems with an eye to self-preservation, has tied the hands of the Office of the Ombudsman in going after hoodlums in robes. The ombudsman has been ordered to step in only after the SC has conducted its own probe and imposed sanctions where appropriate.

But there’s no stopping the Bureau of Internal Revenue and the Anti-Money Laundering Council from working together for what would constitute a lifestyle check on suspected crooks in the judiciary.

Judicial independence and integrity are also undermined by an appointment and promotion system that makes magistrates beholden to politicians and the executive. With political will, reforms in this area aren’t impossible.

I know how quixotic all these suggestions sound in our society. Consider the laws that have never been passed in this country – against political dynasties, campaign finance regulation, and against racketeering. It took a long time, and the threat of international sanctions, before corruption was included among the predicate crimes covered by the Anti-Money Laundering Law.

As that Social Weather Stations survey showed, however, we Pinoys are a hopeful lot. The hope is highest at the start of a new year.

Who knows, President Duterte and the next Congress might surprise us, and make the hoping worth it.