Independence or judicial greed?

People say that justice crawls in this country. A major reason for this is that many courts are vacant. Unfortunately, it appears that the Supreme Court has an incentive for keeping them vacant because the amounts allotted for them are regularly “converted” to savings and distributed among the justices and other court personnel as bonuses and allowances.

This practice was also done in the Armed Forces of the Philippines, which “converted” allocations for vacant positions into gifts for incoming commanders and “pabaon” for outgoing ones. We all know that the investigations by Congress into this practice led to the suicide of one of the more prominent beneficiaries of “conversion.”

The high court must realize that the disbursement of budgetary allocations for purposes other than those provided by law is technical malversation, plain and simple. Is the practice of conversion so profitable that the Court had to issue decisions that, contrary to law, justices are exempt from the obligation of disclosing to proper authorities their statement of assets,  liabilities and net worth?

Those who, in the name of “judicial independence,” are against the Aquino administration’s move to ensure that allocations for unfilled positions are spent as the law intends, are in fact defending, even promoting, “judicial greed.”

—CESAR VELASCO,

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