No more just-tiis?
serving as courtroom and the rear as mediation room. It was patterned after Guatemala’s mobile court system, bringing justice closer to the poor.
At least eight buses have been going across the country for the mobile court proceedings. The buses, costing P8 million each, are air-conditioned and equipped with the necessary amenities. Each bus has a presiding judge, clerk of court, prosecutor, public attorney, court stenographer, docket clerk, process server, driver and security guard. Judges assigned to designated Family Court are assigned to the mobile courts on rotation.
The Supreme Court enhanced the program to grant relief to inmates who are willing to enter a “guilty” plea during arraignment and who have served time in jail longer than their supposed sentence.
As of October, Associate Justice Mariano del Castillo reported that 6, 883 prisoners had been released after their cases had been resolved via the Justice on Wheels program.
Del Castillo said that the release of the 6, 883 prisoners translates into almost P500,000 in savings on the food expenses of the lower courts. Each prisoner gets a daily food allowance of P65.
To complement the Supreme Court’s initiative, Quezon City— the largest local government unit in Metro Manila in terms of land area and population— is pilottesting an aggressive docket decongestion program using an electronic system of identifying cases that need to be cleared through the mobile courts.
Quezon City courts are said to be among the most clogged in the country, with several judges having thousands of cases in their dockets.
To further boost efforts to unclog the courts, Mayor Herbert Bautista said that he was allocating P100 million for the construction of a building for additional courtrooms and another P30 million to renovate the Hall of Justice beside the city hall.
Courtrooms at the Hall of Justice are cramped not only with litigants, but also with folders of case records.
Fully computerizing court records would certainly make the courtrooms look more spacious. And with the mobile court system in place, dockets would be cleared of less complicated cases.
Monitoring the status of cases as well as measuring the performance of judges would be easier.
If these measures were in place 10 years ago, perhaps the sword hanging over my head because of a libel case filed against me in 2001 would have been removed or I could have been serving my sentence in jail by this time.
The official Nobel Prize biobibliographical notes about Mo Yan follows:
Mo Yan ( a pseudonym for Guan Moye) was born in 1955 and grew up in Gaomi in Shandong province in northeastern China. His parents were farmers. As a twelve-year-old during the Cultural Revolution he left school to work, first in agriculture, later in a factory. In 1976 he joined the People’s Liberation Army and during this time began to study literature and write.
His first short story was published in a literary journal in 1981. His breakthrough came a