The noisy critics of today's administration and the one before and even the one before that and so on, love to throw around phrases and concepts so much that they have become meaningless. Stuff like "human rights" and "due process" are harped on as if the beauty and goodness of these things are already self-evident. They're not. No matter how good an idea is, one can't act as if its value is already so undeniable that he doesn't even have to defend it in front of others. These ideas have been taken for granted by its defenders and the people. Good ideas must be defended constantly for they are always under assault by those who have either forgotten their worth or are willfully ignorant of them.
This is the first of a series of writings wherein I'll attempt to defend important ideas that are worth defending in Philippine society. I'm not the smartest man in the world and I don't pretend to be smarter than anyone else in any given room, but someone has to do this job, right?
Ask any Law student or one learned in the Law what "due process" is and he'd probably refer you to Section 1, Article III of the 1987 Constitution which states plainly that no person can be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. That's fine and dandy but it doesn't exactly explain what "due process" is. The simplest answer is best and it helps that it's biblical to boot. "Due process" means that you are heard before you are condemned. In other words, you're given a fair chance to defend yourself, often in a court, before the hammer is dropped on you.
If you look at the whole breadth of human history, you'll notice that it's always been the story of the strong oppressing the weak. There are exceptions sure, but for the most part, it's a story about absolute power and its abuse. Kings, tyrants, slavery, war, etc. Man was helpless against those who lorded over him. When you think about it, due process as a regular "must have" feature of modern constitutions and laws is only a relatively recent advancement.
The Magna Carta is perhaps the most famous example although there are probably earlier examples of checks against absolute and arbitrary exercises of power against the individual. Even before the Spanish colonized the Philippines, some indigenous communities here had justice systems. Some would have suspects go before the Datu and elders or go through trials-by-ordeal to determine their guilt. Granted, it wasn't exactly a scientific method. I doubt dunking ones hands in boiling water is a more accurate system than what we have now.
Due process is important because the state is, compared to the individual, an all powerful monster. It's especially worse in a country like the Philippines where the government is corrupt and abusive. What are you going to do when the state throws the whole government apparatus at you, plus the army, navy, air force and the BIR(gasp!)? I bet you'd be glad for Article III, wouldn't you?
I think that Filipinos don't really have a problem with "due process" as a concept if you explain in in terms of protecting the vulnerable. People generally aren't comfortable with the idea of the police whisking them away in the dead of night to lock them in a windowless cell. The problem is that we don't have a speedy and efficient system to give proper due process. It's no secret that the justice system in the Philippines is quite terrible. "Everyone will have their day in court." is the promise. Well, here in the Philippines, we do one better - everyone gets years! Cases drag on way past the point when time makes any rational sense. There are the horror stories of detainees spending years in jail even before their case even crosses a judge's table. The prisons are horribly overcrowded too. All this isn't even mentioning the corruption which is endemic in all levels of the government service. Then you have police abuses, special treatment for the rich and powerful, etc. It's no wonder then that "due process" has become such an odious phrase to people. The image it conjures up isn't one of justice but of excruciating torture in a country where the process itself seems to be the punishment.
This is the sad thing about all this. It's not that "due process" is bad but that we're bad at it. Our leaders don't seem to even want to give it a chance. Instead of taking measures to fix the system and finding common sense solutions, it seems we're prepared to just do away with the whole damn thing entirely. It's like burning a house to rid it of rats. "Due process", one of the greatest gifts bestowed on our society, a treasure inherited from the best traditions of liberal democracy and a cornerstone of civilization, is just done away with because we don't have the determination and will to make it work. Are we that ungrateful and lazy? Screw a trial, just kill them all. Are we really heading to the point, ladies and gentlemen, where our ancestors in the ancient barangays got better treatment than we do today in 2016?
Here's a novel idea: why don't we fix the system first before we scrap it? Why not open more courts, appoint more judges, build more prisons, modernize the bureaucracy, upgrade our technology to keep digital records, give more resources to barangay-level mediation, pass laws improving the legal system, aggressively root out corrupt court personnel, etc? I'd just like to point out that Duterte technically isn't fixing anything by the way. After six years, will "due process" still be a dirty word? Will there still be believers?
We'll all get what's coming to us eventually.
