The cost of slow justice
Why do certain building owners continue to have a cavalier attitude toward fire and occupational safety rules? For the same reason that several shipping owners continue to ignore maritime safety regulations: few people are penalized when rule violations lead to death and destruction of property. The rare times that penalties are handed down and actually implemented, the process can take decades.
Consider the case of the fire that gutted the Ozone Disco in Quezon City in March 1996. A main entrance that opened the wrong way and the lack of a fire exit trapped disco patrons, most of them students celebrating their graduation, when the fire broke out. The inferno killed 162 people and left at least 93 others injured, many of them permanently disfigured by serious burns.
In November last year, the Sandiganbayan finally sentenced seven former Quezon City government officials and two of the disco owners to 10 years in prison. Last month, the court junked the defendants’ motions for reconsideration, but the verdict can still be appealed to the Supreme Court. Until a final conviction is handed down, all the defendants remain free. The case could languish for another decade before the SC.
The same interminable wait for justice has characterized the few cases brought against the owners of other buildings where fires claimed a heavy human toll, and maritime accidents that have claimed thousands of lives in the past three decades. Even the persistence of deadly fraternity hazing rites can be traced to the glacial pace of Philippine justice. By the time indictments are brought against hazing killers, all the suspects would have left the country.
Like the failure to arrest the killers of journalists and left-wing activists, the failure of justice breeds impunity. Last week’s fire that killed 72 workers in a rubber slipper factory in Valenzuela as usual has led to the creation of a special police task force. Unless justice is rendered speedily and efficiently, however, lessons will not sink in and another conflagration, with a grievous death toll, is sure to happen again in another sweatshop.