The day-to-day legal clashes in court may have become more intense and personal but there’s still no end in sight in the trial of close to 200 defendants in connection with the Maguindanao massacre case.
To speed up hearings, private prosecutor Harry Roque has recommended trimming the number of defendants from 196 to just 35 to focus on those who were primarily responsible for the planning and killing two years ago of 57 people, mostly media workers.
He said the other defendants could be charged with lesser offenses. “At the rate we are going, it could take us at least 20 years to finish this,” Roque said.
At present, there are 196 defendants, each of whom are facing 57 cases. “That’s 11,172 cases. And international studies say that it takes five years to try a single case in the Philippines. So that’s 55,000 years,” Roque said.
He said that not everyone responsible was charged with war crimes after World War II. “Let’s just focus on the primary accused . . . the Ampatuan family and those who actually pulled the trigger,” he added.
On the eve of the second anniversary of the massacre, Amnesty International lamented the “very slow wheels of justice.” The London-based group pressed the government to ensure “effective remedy” for the victims and their families, and to “break the continuing impunity.”
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