“A crisis of the justice system.”
This is how Senator Francis “Kiko” Pangilinan described the current state of the country’s judiciary as he pushed for the creation of a congressional commission to look into possible judicial reforms in the face of the multi-billion-peso flood control scam that has gripped the nation since August last year.
Senate Bill No. 1547 will create the Joint Congressional Commission on Justice System Reform, which the senator and chair of the Senate Committee on Justice and Human Rights said is the “extraordinary remedy” needed in such “extraordinary times.”
“If I may point out that, you know, this measure was introduced in the context of the unprecedented, the largest corruption scandal in the history of the Republic. And it was Chief Justice Puno who said, in another hearing, that extraordinary times require extraordinary remedies,” he said during the committee hearing on Wednesday, March 11.
“And we would like to think the Congressional Commission on Justice Reform is precisely an extraordinary remedy, considering the magnitude of the wanton disregard for the rule of law displayed by the trillions of pesos worth of government funds,” he added.
Pangilinan underscored the need to look into the gaps of the judicial system that have led to low conviction rates and case backlogs that last more than 20 years.
“In sanity, they say, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. And if we are not going to delve deeper into the system of justice in our country and figure out what we should do differently, then the massive corruption will remain unabated,” he stressed.
The senator served as the sponsor of the Judiciary’s budget, emphasizing that the allocation under the 2026 GAA is intended to enhance institutional efficiency, reduce case backlogs, and strengthen mechanisms that promote transparency and accountability within the justice system.
He lamented that despite the Judiciary’s P68.4 billion, the Department of Justice’s P42.8 billion, and the Ombudsman’s P6.41 billion budget for 2026, these only represent 1.27% of the entire P6.793-trillion national budget for this year.
The lawmaker recalled his previous role during the Arroyo administration in upping the judiciary’s budget by as much as P3 billion. He was the Senate representative to the Judicial and Bar Council (JBC) and proposed the creation of a specialized consultative body, or the Judicial, Executive, and Legislative Advisory and Consultative Council (JELACC).
“So that was an out of the box approach to addressing the budgetary support for the judiciary. But we’ve gone a long way. At that time, I think the budget of the Supreme Court was just 20 billion. Now it’s 68 billion,” Pangilinan said.
“But still, it’s only 1.27 percent. So, it’s this kind of thinking and this kind of intervention that we’d like to see in terms of the objective of modernizing and addressing the challenges and gaps in our justice system,” he pointed out.
For the senator, providing additional support for the judiciary will not only modernize the sector, but will enable it to “do its job right and efficiently.”
SBN 1547 seeks to create a temporary, high-level commission to conduct a comprehensive, data-driven review of all five pillars of the justice system—law enforcement, prosecution, the judiciary, the correctional system, and the community.
The commission will be mandated to diagnose systematic failures in public accountability mechanisms, and come up with evidence-based recommendations for both legislative and executive action.