Last week, speaking at her first flag ceremony at the Supreme Court
as the new leader of the judiciary, Chief Justice Teresita de Castro
warned both critics and the two other branches of government to leave
the Court alone.
At first glance, her words seem to be a restatement of conventional wisdom.
“The other members of the coequal and independent branches of the
government should understand that based on our constitutional order, the
decisions reached by the justices of the Supreme Court whether
unanimously or by majority vote, must be respected,” she said. “We
should be left alone to decide the fate of this institution without
interference,” adding: “So we demand respect from the other members of
the coequal and independent branches of the government.”
Could she have been referring to the obvious attempts by the
President of the Philippines and the previous Speaker of the House of
Representatives to intimidate the Court and its previous chief justice,
Maria Lourdes Sereno?
It does not look like Speaker Gloria Arroyo will demand that De Castro pay a courtesy call on her, in the same way that
Rep. Pantaleon Alvarez tried to get Sereno to pay a courtesy call on him.
It also looks like De Castro and President Duterte share the same
views; it does not seem likely that De Castro will receive a public
challenge from the President, and a dare to impose martial law, in the
same way that her predecessor did.
With her at the helm, even if only for less than two months, and with
a majority of justices consistently voting in favor of the President’s
legal positions, it does not look like a major official of either
political branch will attempt again to browbeat the Court in public.
So what could De Castro have been referring to?
If anything, it was she who led the Court into a trap, the
anti-Sereno hearings in the House, where the institutional dignity of
the Court was greatly diminished.
It may be that this appeal, this demand for respect, is an attempt by
the new chief justice to put some distance between her and the sordid
events of the last several months.
But she did not stop there.
“I would like to say,” she also said, “that people outside would like
to judge us from what they see from afar. But it is us the justices and
the employees and officials of the Court who know what is happening
inside the Supreme Court. And we should be left alone to decide for
ourselves.”
There is no question that the members of the Court must reach
decisions by themselves. Any attempt by any official of the executive or
legislative branches of government, or indeed of any outside party, to
influence the decision-making of the Court outside of the legal
processes is illegal and unethical.
There is a wisdom to the deliberate design of the judiciary as a nonpolitical branch of government.
But is this what De Castro meant?
The Court, of course, can never be left completely alone; the
constitutional system of checks and balances assures that, with the
executive wielding appointing power over its members, and the
legislative branch allocating its budget, subject to the fiscal autonomy
guarantee given to the judiciary by the Constitution.
What De Castro apparently refers to is public perception of Court
decisions (“people outside would like to judge us”) and then contrasts
that with insider knowledge (“it is us… who know what is happening
inside”). Then she concludes by returning to her theme: “And we should
be left alone to decide for ourselves.”
It seems what De Castro is really getting at is the undue,
unaccounted or unmeasured influence of public opinion on judicial
decisions.
In sum: People outside the Court judge the justices by what they see
“from afar.” They should instead judge the Court by how “the justices
and the employees and officials” decide.
This is a plea easy enough to understand, but at its core is a
fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the Court and the rest of
the judiciary in the democratic project.
The Court must decide according to “facts and the law,” that is true.
But both the facts and the law must reflect reality. It is eminently
the role of the public to impress this reality on the decision-making of
the Court.
The justices can facilitate this process by observing the principle
of transparency as much as possible; or they can ignore it altogether.
But there’s no escaping the pressure of public opinion; that’s democracy.
source: Philippine Daily Inquirer
