Sereno: Justice is just as vital as food in nourishing society

“For every injustice done to a breadwinner in a poor family, you destroy five lives,” Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno said on Monday as she attended the Pandesal Forum at the Kamuning Bakery Café in Quezon City.

Sereno made this point this as she underscored the wide-ranging effects of violating a suspect’s right to due process, in yet another one of her thinly-veiled allusions to abusive authorities and mob mentality.

She compared justice to bread and stressed the importance of justice to “nourish our spiritual and psychological needs in this society.”

“The person working every day, you strip him of his dignity, detain him, beat him up, and say he was the culprit without any investigation. He will lose his livelihood,” Sereno said.

The spouse, too, would have to look for him in every jail or hospital once he goes missing.

“Her life will be wrecked too,” Sereno said. “She won’t go to work. She’ll get fired. After one week of constant absences, she will lose her job.”

This would just as well be the case with their children who have to manage the house and take care of younger siblings, at the expense of their schooling.

“You would have destroyed five lives, and young people will have bad thoughts,” Sereno said. “There are few things that are very, very important to a person and one of these is justice.”

“We are all aware of the problems with justice,” she added. “We confront people, those in the positions of authority, on what justice means to the ordinary people. Justice must come fully alive. It should be felt.”

In telling this account, Sereno drew from her experiences as a young lawyer, while her former classmates and her high school teacher watched in what turned out to be her homecoming.

Previously, on the 45th anniversary of dictator Ferdinand Marcos’s declaration of martial law on Sept. 21, Sereno delivered a speech criticizing the Duterte administration’s war on drugs and stressing the importance of due process.

The speech took the form of an imaginary dialogue with the late human rights lawyer Jose “Pepe” Diokno, who would remind Sereno that “if only the Constitution is alive and sustained in the hearts of every citizen and public servant, there would be no worries.”

Monday, Oct. 16, is the United Nations’ World Bread Day. But in 2015, Wilson Lee Flores, a writer, teacher, and realty entrepreneur who is moderates the Pandesal Forum, started celebrating the day as World Pandesal Day. /atm