Sen. Leila de Lima. (INQUIRER FILE PHOTO)
MANILA, Philippines — As the end of her term nears, detained Sen. Leila de Lima gave a withering assessment of the country’s criminal justice system, describing it as “broken in spirit” and “lacking soul” because of its propensity to view the accused as “no longer fully human” and unworthy of human rights.
“Our criminal justice system is broken not just in the ‘how’ but also as to ‘why.’ If it were a person, the criminal justice system is not only broken in body, it is broken in spirit. I would go so far as to say that it is lacking a soul,” said the senator, who spoke at a recent University of the Philippines forum through her deputy chief of staff.
“It moves, but never toward anything productive. It moves just for the sake of being able to say that it moves. A zombie in the legal world,” she said in a presentation delivered on her behalf by Catherine Sy during the Sixth Spanish-Filipino Scientific Congress on June 10.
De Lima, whose term is ending after she failed to get reelected in the just concluded May polls, titled her talk “Modernizing Criminal Law by Updating Our Approach to Criminal Behavior: Taking the Path of Transformative Justice.”
Detained since 2017
The senator has been detained at the Philippine National Police headquarters in Camp Crame in Quezon City since February 2017 on what she claimed were “trumped up” charges that she was involved in illegal drug trading at New Bilibid Prison in Muntinlupa City during her stint as justice secretary under the Aquino administration.
Several key witnesses have since recanted all their allegations against her, prompting human rights organizations to demand her immediate release and pressuring justice department officials to review two of her three illegal drug cases, with one already dismissed.
‘Utterly disappointed’
According to De Lima, none of the necessary and urgent reforms on criminal law have been instituted because of people’s tendency to look at the accused as “no longer fully human and, therefore, are no longer worthy of full respect for their humanity and their rights.”
“To say that I am utterly disappointed with the lack of progress in the efforts to modernize our criminal law system is to understate the problem,” she said in her talk.
De Lima said she believed that the real first step to truly solving the problems relating to modernizing the country’s criminal law system was to “commit ourselves to see these real ills and want to resolve them.”
She said her experience of being “unjustly detained for the last five years” had given her a perspective that is rare in history—“that of an advocate and defender, turned victim, turned survivor, turned reformist.”
“Being shown how the wheel of justice operates from all possible sides, I can say that we have to approach criminal laws from a more inquisitive perspective, i.e., one that searches for the anatomy of crimes beyond looking at the motive, the instrumentality and the opportunity of each particular incident,” she said.
“Instead, one that starts with one fundamental and, to my mind, game-changing question: What kind of society do we want to live in?” De Lima said.
“And, from there, asking what should be done to bring us closer to that aspirational society,” she added.
RELATED STORIES
Chief Justice Gesmundo on Independence Day: Protect, nurture our rights, freedom
Outgoing justice chief Guevarra: DOJ upheld law, respected human rights
Lozada’s fate ‘an indictment of PH justice system’–Lacson