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Opening Remarks delivered by Chief Justice Maria Lourdes P. A. Sereno during the 5th Plenary Assembly of the Philippine Judicial Academy (PHILJA) Corps of Professors on May 20, 2016 at the CA Auditorium, Court of Appeals, Manila

Friends, thank you very much. Please take your seats.

I want to continue the conversation we had in 2014, I think, (PHILJA

Chancellor) Justice Adolfo [S. Azcuna], when I delivered a thought piece, and

which is the start of [this] conversation. This conversation about judicial

education and training is being carried on not only between the Chief Justice

and the members of the Supreme Court but also with the rest of the judiciary

at its different levels. And I’m very honored by the presence of (Court of

Appeals Presiding Justice) PJ [Andres B.] Reyes[,Jr.] and (Court of Tax

Appeals) PJ Roman [G.] Del Rosario. I am very honored of course with the

[presence of] retired justices of the Supreme Court, Justices Azcuna and

(PHILJA Vice-Chancellor) [Romeo J.] Callejo,[Sr.] and retired and incumbent

justices of the Court of Appeals, some of whom are very active here. Court

Administrator [Jose] Midas [P.] Marquez, Fr. [Ranhilio] “Rannie” [C. Aquino],

Dean [Sedfrey M.] Candelaria, my friend from way back in Ateneo, Dr.

[Cheselden George V.] Carmona, (Regional Trial Court Branch 158, Pasig City)

Judge [Maria Rowena M.] San Pedro, (CA) Justice [Filomena “Monette” D.]

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Singh, Judge [Thelma A.] Ponferrada. I thank all of you, judges, retired and

incumbent, friends, court attorneys, PHILJA personnel, and others, thank you

very much for being here with me this morning and for agreeing to spend

much of your time in further propagation of the ideas of judicial reform.

Thank you, Justice Azcuna for bringing to everybody’s mind the thought piece

that I delivered.

You know, I was in the original batch or in the earlier batches of PHILJA

Corps of Professors, and I was given an innocuous part called Law and

Economics. But after having thought about judicial reform more intensely—

my friends from the academe are also here—can I see the hands of the law

professors who are here? Dean Candelaria (of Ateneo Law School), okay, very

good, thank you very much; Justice [Hilarion L.] Aquino (of Ateneo Law School

and San Beda Graduate School of Law), Justice [Oswaldo D.] Agcaoili (of

University of Santo Tomas Faculty of Civil Law), of course, they are now in a

dual capacity.

I thought many of our law schools are already doing their jobs well.

PHILJA doesn’t have to replicate what they are doing. And I saw the great gap

between what a great judge should do in the courtroom and what we are

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equipping the judge for. And perhaps, I thought, a rethinking was timely. And

in my first forays and my first visits to the courts, I was so enlightened by the

presence of so many reformist judges at all levels. And it has largely been

because of their inspired work that I thought that a professional educator like

Dean Candelaria and I in my past life should rethink the whole concept of

education and training for judges. And I looked at the statutory mandate of

PHILJA. I looked at what PHILJA had been producing and doing all these years,

and I thought PHILJA can do more.

So please allow me first to congratulate, to commend the Philippine

Judicial Academy under the leadership of Chancellor Justice Adolfo Azcuna for

organizing this timely gathering as we collectively formalize concrete steps

towards the enhancement of the curriculum and capacity-building

[capabilities] of the Academy.

In 2014, after 18 years of PHILJA’s existence, I indicated as Chairperson

of the Board of Trustees of PHILJA that it was high time for a reassessment of

PHILJA’s role vis-à-vis its mandate under its charter. As the training arm of the

Supreme Court, PHILJA should be the Supreme Court’s co-advocate and co-

implementer of reform. It was not enough for the Chief Justice and the rest of

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the members of the Court to initiate reform. Change in PHILJA must come

from within. PHILJA’s mandate places it at the frontline in reform, occupying a

unique place as the Supreme Court’s purveyor of judicial education and

because of its research capability also, it is in a unique place to act as the

Supreme Court’s think tank.

But what our judges and court personnel need is not old school

classroom-style education. Rather, what we need is education that is

transformative in equipping our judges for leadership in the courtroom. The

traditional brand of education in law schools has already prepared all of us to

become lawyers and the jurists that some of us are. PHILJA’s brand of

education should prepare our judges to become able and independent jurists.

With these in mind, we must pose the following questions: Is PHILJA

formulating training programs that prepare our judges and court personnel

for what await them in the courtrooms? Has PHILJA’s training curriculum

improved the competence, efficiency, and ethical awareness of judicial officers

and their staff complement? Are PHILJA’s performance standards at par and in

step with international standards?

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To answer these queries, a sub-committee was formed not just to

review PHILJA’s curriculum but even more importantly to reevaluate PHILJA’s

Corps’ direction. The result of the sub-committee has been presented to the

Board of Trustees of the PHILJA. And I can assure you that the Board of

Trustees reacted positively to the presentation made by Dean Candelaria at

the last meeting of the Board of Trustees. And with further instructions by the

Board, it is now being presented to the Corps of Professors.

It will be noted that you will see a very marked difference in both

content and methodology between the current and the revised curricular

offerings. Ladderized education, as I had suggested, is proposed to be adopted.

And specialized education is not only going to be encouraged, but PHILJA will

promote guided and assisted specialization. That is how I understood the

presentation of Dean Candelaria to be. Dean, feel free to interject later on the

impressions that I have formed from your short but very substantive

presentation.

Let me now give my thoughts on some of the ideas that had been

presented by Dean Candelaria to the Board of Trustees of PHILJA. After the

passage of the Judiciary Reorganization Act of 1980 or BP (Batas Pambansa

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Blg.) 129, specialization has been institutionalized through subsequent

legislation. The judiciary has had to cope not only with the demands of

implementing rules and guidelines, but more importantly, the need to reorient

and train our generalist judges to be able to act as specialists. PHILJA has

therefore provided training to our specially designated commercial courts,

family courts, drug courts, environmental or green courts, and during election

season, to our designated election courts. Capsulized, the PHILJA programs

provide the attendees with the needed special knowledge to handle cases

peculiar to their assigned spheres.

Today, however, and I bring good news: we need to do more. Doing

more is actually always good news. We need PHILJA first to formulate more

proactive training programs for the courts for judges, court personnel, and

court users alike. What do I mean by proactive? As the Supreme Court pushes

its reform agenda forward, the PHILJA must conceptualize programs that

embody and incorporate these reforms. And towards this end, PHILJA must

always be in the loop on what is going on in the thinking of the Supreme Court

En Banc, the key members of the Court who are thinking of reform measures,

as well as the key committees that are heading the reform programs of the

Court.

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This is one way of ensuring the institutionalization of reforms and of

training court people and its users to uniformly and consistently implement

and abide by these reforms. One risk for any reform measure that the

Supreme Court will implement is if our people are not sufficiently trained to

implement these reforms, and these reforms might prove to be failures not

because the ideas were not good but because our users—our court

personnel— were not sufficiently trained to implement them. Allow me to cite

a concrete example. And this is by way of warning you about the pace by

which reforms continue to be discussed week-in and week-out by the

Supreme Court.

Congress passed the Cybercrime Prevention Act, and I think we have one

of our PHILJA Professors here in whose honor the decision is named. With the

finality of our decision upholding its constitutionality, save for certain

provisions, some members of the Court, especially those who just came from

Bangkok together with PJ Andres Reyes, are already advancing the idea of

cybercrime courts in the very near future. Actually, I have commissioned

Justice [Apolinario] “Pol” [D.] Bruselas, [Jr.] two years ago to give me a

template for the establishment of cybercrime courts. Except for the fact that I

had been stymied because of my very, very heavy workload in all areas of the

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role that I am discharging, I had been wanting to push the agenda of

designating cybercourts ASAP [as soon as possible]. But we all know that to

equip us for these cybercrime courts, our judges must know how cybercrimes

first of all are done. Because we do not engage in criminal acts in the

cyberworld, we need a lot of exposure in this regard.

Once we make that decision to push for the designation of cybercrime

courts, PHILJA must do cluster training for all the designated courts. And it

will require a lot of conceptualization and even knowledge on the part of

PHILJA’s people on what are the requirements for a cybercrime court to fully

function. But cluster training should not be limited to the judges.

The rule of law is not dependent completely on the judiciary. We have

the pillars of justice, our co-actors in the justice sector. And we cannot be so

advanced in our knowledge and skills but deal with people who are not as

well-equipped. So we should adopt what is a multi-sectoral and

interdisciplinary approach to delivering real-time justice to the public. This is

in keeping with the Justice Sector Coordinating Council mandate that I had.

For those of you who might not yet know, the Supreme Court

conformed to allowing the Chief Justice, the Secretary of Justice, and the

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Secretary of Interior and Local Government to form a coordinative group

called the Justice Sector Coordinating Council. For a number of years, it wasn’t

able to progress much. But we achieved a breakthrough when in 2015—was it

in 2015, Justice Monette, that we adopted the Justice Zone concept?—that the

judiciary with the leadership of Justice Singh and some of the other judges was

able to draw a justice map. And the justice map talks about the start of a

criminal case from the moment a complaint is filed in the barangay all the way

up to the conviction and rehabilitation of a convicted offender, and it already

pointed out 84 activities or sets of activities that must be done. And many of

these activities have to be done in a coordinated fashion. Otherwise, justice

will fail.

In other words, my philosophy and that being implemented right now in

the Justice Sector Coordinating Council—and many of you judges here are

involved in this—is that we stop operating in silos. It is time that we judges

understand what prosecutors are thinking. PAO (Public Attorney’s Office)

lawyers must know how judges think. And the police must understand what is

required of due process so that they can discharge their role as genuine law

enforcement agencies who, when they are called upon for example to witness

in court, understand the responsibility that they are facing.

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If you had been keeping abreast of announcements that we had made,

Quezon City is our first Justice Zone. And in Quezon City, we have already

identified that it has already coordinative work or the metrics that are

required for all the justice actors in Quezon City to really do coordinative

work but respecting their independence. And it has worked. It has worked so

very well that the decision is to propagate the concept of creating more Justice

Zones all over the country. And eight (8) of these will be promoted through the

use of European Union aid money until 2019.

Now, in keeping with this concept, it is therefore not enough that our

judges are very, very well-trained judges. They cannot be very good judges

unless their prosecutors are also good, unless the public defenders are also

good, unless everyone involved in the justice sector are also good. So I suggest

that when we talk about cybercrime courts for example, it should be thus

multi-perspective. In other words, the court, every judge must understand

what the NBI [National Bureau of Investigation] and the intelligence agencies

do in order to track or find out the basis for filing a request for surveillance or

a search warrant before a cybercrime court.

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But before we can do that—Justice [Mariano] “Mar” [C. del Castillo] is

here, thank you very much Justice Mar—but before we can do that, they also

need to find out what are the standards that judges believe, that the court has

laid down in the case of Disini vs. Executive Secretary.

So we have to draft a training module that will prepare not just our

judges and their personnel but also the other stakeholders who will a play

role in the adjudication and the resolution of cybercrime cases like the

prosecutors, the public attorneys, the law enforcement agencies, and yes, even

the lawyers within the bounds of preserving our independence as a judiciary.

These trainings should be done in partnership with the concerned

agencies, and the ideal we are aiming for is that with the learnings imparted to

each cluster, there will be less occasion for conflicting interpretations of the

law, rules, or jurisprudence, . . . less questioned or [less] questionable

procedural commissions or digressions, more consistency in case processing

and resolution. The ultimate result would be consistent application of the law,

court decisions and practices, with the corresponding improvement in

disposition schedules, disposition rates, reduction in appeals, and reduction in

challenges to the regional court’s proceedings and outcomes. This speaks of

overall court and case decongestion and avoidance of delay.

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A precursor of this clustered training—just to show you how effective it

can be—is already being done for regular courts that are designated as Family

Courts through the competency enhancement training program for which we

acknowledge the efforts of Associate Justice Teresita De Castro, Chairperson

of the Supreme Court Committee on Family Courts and Juvenile Concerns.

These programs bring together and train the judges, court personnel, social

workers, prosecutors, public attorneys and police officers. We should add the

barangay officials as well to complete the network of stakeholders whose

roles in the handling of family cases involving minors, intertwine and

complement each other; then this training program is supplemented by a

training manual. The Family Court CEP (Career Enhancement Program)

program is thus an ideal template for the envisioned cluster training.

We must also design programs addressed to the different levels of the

judiciary. In other words, for appellate courts, for the tertiary level courts, we

need to consult very closely with PJ Andres Reyes and his colleagues in the

Court of Appeals, with PJ Roman Del Rosario and his colleagues in the CTA,

and with PJ “Ampi” Tang and her colleagues in the Sandiganbayan. This is

something that we need to move forward as we keep on identifying areas

where efficiencies can still be pushed in the different tertiary level courts. But

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these changes can only be achieved if the Academic Council and the different

departments [of PHILJA] are revitalized.

As PHILJA is shifting away from the traditional approach to education

and becoming more sensitive to adult education for professionals, which

combine many teaching techniques, it cannot be therefore run and operated

like a traditional law academic institution. Its departments should conform to

the future that we are envisioning. An example could be the Federal Judicial

Center (FJC), which is the education and research arm of the United States

Supreme Court. In the FJC’s education division, which is similar to PHILJA,

some of their departments for example are the Management and Professional

Development Education Division; the Judicial and Legal Education Division;

Executive Education Division; Probation and Pre-trial Services, Education, and

Media Operations Division. I do not ask you to copy it, but the concept is let us

consider governance according to the kind of program we are designing to

ultimately provide the kind of judges and court personnel we need. Clearly, at

least in the mind of the US Supreme Court, the FJC’s structure is reflective of

the needs of its constituency. Its divisions address the spectrum of training

needs of its target clientele.

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On the other hand, I see so much potential in the lawyers of PHILJA. I

have been meeting many of them, and I’m so impressed by their intelligence

and their dedication to work. I believe that they are underutilized, and I

believe that PHILJA should push for the creation of judicial education

specialists starting with these lawyers who will be equipped as the experts on

adult education, especially judicial adult education, who will continue to

research and experiment on the best teaching techniques for judges. For

example, our judges are already suffering from the fact that they sit in their

courtrooms too much. An inordinate amount of their time is in a sedentary

position. What kind of technique or methodology do you employ so that these

judges can really take a break and maximize the effective use of their training

time when they are being conducted by PHILJA?

I also envision that the judicial education specialists will not only be

experts in adult education for the justice sector, but eventually, can be experts

in substantive areas of law themselves. We have the highest respect for the

present composition of the different academic departments of PHILJA, but

allow me to say that they are academic departments that are reflective of a

law school. PHILJA however, is not a traditional school; that is why it has a

special charter. Its trainees require highly specialized trainings, more

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importantly its trainees already come from some of the best law schools in the

country. So perhaps, it is maybe even a disservice to these law schools who

have already spent so much effort training them that we are repeating what

they have done in this course.

What PHILJA must do is to respect the work of these law schools by

recognizing that these trainees already come with baseline knowledge, and

direct these already well-formed, very competent adult professionals, redirect

the formation of that person to become an outstanding judge. This I think is

the more respectful approach to the law schools. Therefore, PHILJA must try

to develop in the judges and inculcate in them a comprehensive skill set that

will make them good presiders of trials, good docket management people,

even good at handling court personnel.

We must prepare them for the challenges in a Philippine court setting,

and if we had gone through all the courtrooms in the country as Justice del

Castillo has had, you will be confronted with the fact that you may have very

sophisticated courtrooms in some areas, as well as courtrooms with the most,

even some very, deficient facilities. And our judges must be prepared for any

such contingency.

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So how do we prepare them then for that future? As we implement

more judicial reform programs, we see the need for PHILJA to come up with

relevant training programs that will be in sync with the objectives of these

reform programs. For instance, more programs on enhanced skills

development in expedited hearings, effective mediation and continuous trial;

integrating also and recognizing the best practices that we can already see

being implemented by the judges themselves. In other words, the idea is it is

not a top down design system but we absorb the best that is happening in the

field guided by the direction that the Supreme Court has been setting.

And remember in the various discussions and conversations I have had

with you and with the rest of the public, what is the future? The future is the

electronic court, the future is continuous trial, the future is one year

termination from start to finish, perhaps two years for the lower courts. The

future is counting in terms of months, the future is no snail mail, the future is

orders immediately being given to the litigants right before you. The future is

updating of case status through the internet, the future is less cost of judicial

disputes. The future is effective alternative dispute resolution methods. The

future is a public that believes that we operate a transparent, honest, and

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trustworthy judiciary. The future is that the judiciary is going to set the

standard for public service, and the standard is it must be the gold standard.

Currencies brought about by changes in political administrations may

rise and fall, but the judiciary will, and must remain the gold standard for

public service. That is why for example in Quezon City, and I wish to include

other courts in NCR (National Capital Region) and eventually the entire

country, forensics training is already being exposed to our judges. The judges

are now going to the central crime laboratory of the Philippine National

Police, and for the first time they are hearing how DNA evidence, how bullet

examination is actually being conducted. So judges no longer just hear it for

the first time when they are confronted with testimonies about how these

things are being done, but they already are understanding the industry’s best

practices, and in their minds they are already formulating the kinds of

questions that should be answered when these kinds of evidence are being

presented. And the fact that the judges of Quezon City have given me such a

positive response and even to the concept of scientific and professional

evidence management means that the future for a multi-sectoral integrated

approach is bright.

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Hence, I believe that the best kind of leadership in the various

leadership positions in PHILJA should be through working active chairpersons

or leaders because it is the only way for the clusters or departments or

groups, whatever you will call it, will work. Those who have and are involved

because they have a personal stake in ensuring that the courts for example,

that they are leading are effective.

Allow me to give you examples. One example is the Committee on

Commercial Courts chaired by Associate Justice Estela Perlas-Bernabe.

Because the Supreme Court has given her the mandate to try to figure out how

to make our commercial courts really effective, she is not only involved with a

revision, the finalization, and further revision and enhancement of the rules,

we have [also] given her the mandate to oversee the effectivity of commercial

courts. And I have requested her to look at the best practices worldwide to

find out how our commercial courts can capture the trust of the investor

community. My request is for her to find out in what way the best can join

these courts, be trained for these courts and have strict performance

standards imposed on them. So, please note that when you get appointed to

one of these so-called courts in which we are going to invest heavily in, that

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also means that performance standards—strict ones—will be imposed on you.

So it cuts both ways. It’s a fair deal, I think.

The Committee of Justice Bernabe has just come up with the 2015

Financial Liquidation of Suspension of Payments Rules, and have been doing

consistent training for our commercial courts. Because she’s an active chair,

and an active working chairperson, when she gives talk before the business

community, they find her discussion with them highly credible because they

know that she is the frontliner in the reform of the commercial court system.

Again, another is the Speedy Justice Committee headed by Justice

[Diosdado M.] Peralta, which has been responsible for the continuous trial

program. It has also been reviewing the small claims work and its chair has

been active in also being a trainor in PHILJA’s program.

Another outstanding reform success, of course, is the EJOW (Enhanced

Justice on Wheels) Program headed by Justice Mariano del Castillo, and he is, of

course, our expert on these systems of expediting hearings and case

disposition through alternative means. That is where you, Corps of Professors,

those of you who have served over the past two decades, will fit in. Advisory

committees that are multi-disciplinary, and taking [into] account all the

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specific needs of each type of court, providing substantive law updates, skills

in handling specific types of cases—I think this is the way forward. No longer

are we just going to rely on specialization on substantive law. But the key

objective is to produce a judge who will be not only highly trained in the

substantive law area but more importantly in managing a case of the kind that

is being given to him or to her.

In short, if the PHILJA is to play its role effectively as the Supreme

Court’s partner in reform, its departments—all administrative as well as

academic departments—must work together and in sync towards the same

objective.

Please note that in my judicial reform program, which will run through

until 2030, I have integrated metrics to measure success outcomes for each

area of judicial reform. And if the metrics are going to be integrated into how

we do our work, then we must be open to all ideas that will bring us closer to

achieving our desired outcomes.

PHILJA must also fully realize its research functions. And in this,

because of this, I encourage the research department of PHILJA to go to the

field and talk to the judges. I would like research that is based on data on the

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field, experiential data, anecdotal data, survey data, court record data, and

whatever kind of statistical indicators we can look at in pursuing reform.

For example, when the Hustisyeah! Program, the first major intervention

that I pushed for case decongestion was launched, the Decongestion Team

was able to inventory 33,000 cases. Thirty-three thousand! Can you just

imagine the size of that data? Each data inventory, each case inventory, needs

the team of congestion people to fill out fields—very, very long fields—which

will measure and identify the causes of delay, what dates, how was it

disposed, with the ultimate objective of coming up with a disposition or

decongestion program for the judge concerned. Now, some Quezon City

judges are here with us, and they can already attest to the fact that after 14

months, the decongestion program resulted in a 30 percent reduction in the

docket of Quezon City.

Of course, their problem now is the prosecutors of Quezon City are also

very active in filing more cases. But that’s another problem and we address

that later.

My point is, and I have been lamenting this since last year, if you have

33,000 cases files that are there, where is the researcher who will look at

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those 33,000 cases and tell us where are the major points of delay and how do

we bring the [case] forward and avoid delay?

I need to find out what are the oldest cases. Maybe there are cases that

are pending for more than 40 years, and why have they been pending for 40

years? Perhaps it is a land case. Perhaps it is because land cases are so

complicated and perhaps it is because substantive law has been conflicting

with each other. Maybe it is because the Rules are not clear enough or have

not been formulated for these highly problematic cases. Because you have so

many land regimes. You have the Agrarian Reform [Law]; you have the Public

Land Act. You have so many land regimes.

Can we already assume that our judges, upon their appointment, are

already fully equipped to understand the contradictions in these laws and

how to handle these? Or are we in a continuing state where we are ignoring

major parts of the problems or some of the problems besetting our courts?

The key is looking at the data that we have already unearthed. The data

is already there. It is waiting for law schools to analyze. It is waiting for

Sedfrey and his research team to analyze.

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I have been quite straightforward that if money is required to revitalize

PHILJA, I have never consciously attempted to withhold financial support if it

is needed. But the point is every expenditure of PHILJA must be objective-

focused.

So, if our objective is to identify the major problems there besetting,

then what we need to do is research. That is why with all of my discussions

with the Philippine Association of Law Schools, I have kept on telling them,

perhaps it’s been three years now, “Where is the research that will push the

Supreme Court to change the Bar examination and confine it only to four

major areas?” Where is the research? So, that is one major reform area that

PHILJA can focus on. And I do not mean again, traditional research which is

focused, for example, on a theoretical academic subject.

I want research—and we will give good money for research to be

done—on what problems really assail the justice system with special

emphasis on the judiciary.

For example, in all my forays, in all my discussions with the judges, they

keep on saying, “Our prosecutors are insufficient in numbers, they are not well

trained.” So that is a problem area, and how do we put it forward with the

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Department of Justice without sounding unprofessional about the problem?

What I had been asking our judges and the PHILJA to do is to give me a

document that will say one major reasons for the delay in our prosecution is

our lack of prosecutors. I can only give that because that is the only way I can

act professionally as Chief Justice.

So the function of the research arm of PHILJA must go hand in hand with

the curriculum review of PHILJA. And I thank Dean Candelaria because when I

asked him if he can set aside more time for PHILJA, as he leads the question of

how to equip the education specialist that we have been discussing, he said

yes, he will take whatever necessary time he needs to from his already very

busy schedule.

So allow me to just summarize that I believe that the two spheres of

PHILJA, the left arm and the right arm. The left arm being the research

department and the right arm being the academic department should go hand

in hand to strengthen each other.

It is also actually a smart move if PHILJA’s research department takes

the occasion that the judges are there and cannot escape from their training

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program to conduct interviews with them for the purpose of feeding data to

its research program.

Another would be the need to harmonize conflicting decisions of the

Supreme Court. I have never been one to shy away from the fact that we still

might have problems with respect to conflicting decisions of the Supreme

Court. As Chief Justice, I try to institute a system where I personally and my

lawyers would vet and go over the decisions of the three different Divisions to

find out whether there are contradictions. Justice Roman has always told me

about this. PJ Reyes hints at this. And even conflicts within the different levels

of the tertiary courts is actually also a problem.

While I try to do this, it was really too much for my office to handle. And

that is why I thank Justice Azcuna and Justice Callejo for helping me think

about this problem, and I hope more effort can be given by PHILJA to help the

Supreme Court avoid conflicting decisions. So we must all look at it as a

collective problem. Which means that ultimately, what we aim for is really

stability of jurisprudence.

Now, with metrics. Please be informed that the Civil Service Commission

will not authorize the promotion of court personnel unless the judiciary has

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already implemented the Strategic Performance Measurement System. And I

would like PHILJA to help educate our judges in implementing this

Measurement System. It’s a long form. It’s a discussion where there is a review

between the judge and the court personnel where they come up with

assessment.

Recently, I received so many complaints from lower court personnel

asking why the midyear bonus under EO 201 has not yet been distributed to

lower courts. I found out that many lower courts, (Makati RTC Executive

Judge) EJ [Selma P.] Alaras, I don’t know whether you are aware of this, I

found out that many lower courts have not been submitting the measurement

forms. I, for one, am going to push for a design of an incentive program that is

separate from whatever is being implemented nationally. In other words, not

only will our budget be dependent on measured outcomes because that is

already the thrust of the national government, even the bonuses of court

personnel will now be dependent on satisfaction of measurement tools.

So this kind of culture whereby we subject ourselves to strict standards

of accountability must be the culture of the entire judiciary—our entire

30,000 workforce. And it must be PHILJA who in their training programs,

must inform the sheriffs, the interpreters, clerks of court, and even the judges

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that “You know, everything has to be accounted for not only with respect to

your satisfaction on the constitutional and statutory deadlines for disposing of

cases, not only in the fidelity with which you handle court documents but also

in the kind of service orientation that [you] are providing our public.” The

lower courts are our frontline delivery personnel. The satisfaction must be

better than biting into the best hamburger. The high of encountering a fair

court proceeding must be as good as the kick provided by a Starbucks latte.

(audience laughter)

So this is the kind of service orientation that we must re-engineer all our

efforts towards. No longer should we consider ourselves as entitled to

prestige and honor. Rather, our prestige and honor must come from the fact

that we are authentic individuals doing our very best to serve our country in

the area that we have been trained for, which is the administration of justice.

On the other hand, not only will these performance measurements

impact the giving of financial incentives, it will also fit in the appointment and

promotion of the members of the judiciary as well as in the appointment and

promotion of the non-judge personnel.

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In my very first speech before the Philippine Judges Association, I have

already given this commitment that we are moving towards a merit-based

promotion system. Of course, you understand that as head of the JBC (Judicial

and Bar Council), I still have to deal with political issues, many of which are

not within my control.

But for the 7,400 applications that the JBC processed last year, from a

low of 1, 200 in 2012—just imagine we are now processing 7,400—I can tell

you that higher and higher standards are being imposed, more scientific

improvements are being deployed. We still lack so many things.

We are going for a full disclosure form for these next few years, when

even the possibilities [of] conflicts of interest must be candidly discussed by

the applicant, disclosing his financial and social interests so that at the very

beginning the judge already knows it is her positive duty already to avoid any

conflict of interest. And that means that this is also the culture that PHILJA

must also embrace—accountability—because we are entering a special

profession: the profession of the judiciary, and the highest performance

standards and the strongest scrutiny of our lives cannot be avoided.

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And therefore, revising the curriculum that you are doing now is such a

formidable task. May I warn you therefore if you can set aside for a brief

moment your emotions or your connectedness to a baby you may have

nurtured all this time and for this brief spell, when we are putting our

collective thoughts together, [we must] open ourselves to the possibility of

change because we want to serve our countrymen in a way that they can

genuinely feel and in a way that can be scientifically measured. This is our

future: that we are transforming ourselves [from being] a passive branch into

becoming the most active branch in the sense of wanting genuine change to

happen and change that will last beyond my term. And therefore, it is with

deep gratitude that I convey to you the thanks of the Court, especially to

Justice Azcuna, for his unflagging devotion to the leadership of the Academy,

Justice Callejo, (PHILJA Chief of Office for Academic Affairs) Justice [Delilah

Vidallon-]Magtolis, (PHILJA Executive Secretary) Justice [Marina L.] Buzon,

and to all of you, esteemed members of the Corps of Professors, friends, and

stakeholders, we have nothing but your highest good and the enhancement of

your professional potential in mind.

Whatever support is necessary from the Court En Banc and from the

Chief Justice will be generously given. But the only thing we ask from you is

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the passion to be open to change, the passion for the continued work of

excellence. And it is with this knowledge that you are untiring in your love of

country and in your devotion to the Rule of Law, that I thank you and I bid you

goodbye.