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THE Supreme Court (SC) deserves praise for ordering the release of 286 people from prisons after the minimum periods of their sentences.
In a statement, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said that the action, while overdue, merits support from all quarters, particularly the families of the prisoners and officials of the Bureau of Corrections (BuCor), the agency that oversees the National Penitentiary at Muntinlupa City under the Department of Justice (DOJ).
The problem of overstaying prisoners, the late journalist, newspaper columnist and former political prisoner Julius Fortuna said, was so serious in Muntinlupa that he had to help those in the minimum-security and medium-security areas to be released.
Fortuna had to write letters on behalf of the prisoners addressed to the BuCor, the DOJ and even up to the Office of the President (OP) during the martial-law period to secure the freedom of the prisoners.
A former leader of the Movement for a Democratic Philippines (MDP) who was arrested in the mid-1970s, Fortuna spent more than eight years in various prisons and in the National Penitentiary before he was finally released. Another former prisoner, activist Alfonso Sabilano, who was convicted of double murder in the early 1970s, said, “Those who should have been released continue to stay in the penitentiary simply because their papers do not move.”
“The court’s long-overdue action is designed to address the country’s serious problem of lengthy pretrial detention and is part of what the Court called its ‘Judgment Day’ program that, along with ‘Justice on Wheels’ and ‘Hustisyeah!,’ aims to decongest the Philippines’s notoriously overcrowded detention facilities,” HRW said.
The releases of detainees and prisoners got a push during the incumbency of Chief Justice Reynato Puno, who supervised Justice on Wheels declogged dockets and freed inmates found to have served their sentences.
However, the HRW is mainly concerned about the detainees who are in the pretrial stage, claiming that up to 70,000 people belong to that category of inmates who should be in municipal, city or provincial jails, all because their cases are nonbailable or they could not raise bail at all.
“The SC deserves credit for taking the initiative to address the problem of lengthy pretrial detention in the Philippines. But the release of these detainees is nothing more than a symbolic drop in the bucket in comparison to the more than 70,000 people currently in detention awaiting trial for often extremely lengthy periods. Many spend decades in jail waiting for their case to go before a judge,” the group noted.
In June 2014 the International Center for Prison Studies noted that the Philippines has the highest number of pretrial detainees in Southeast Asia and the sixth highest in the world.
Marvyn N. Benaning / Correspondent.
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