Justice is a very important component in human life. While a person has a high level of tolerance for poverty, there is a limit to the injustice he can bear. When the cup overflows, expect the unexpected.
During the administration of President Ferdinand Marcos, people who filed criminal complaints with the Department of Justice were not required to pay any fees.
More importantly, the respondent—the person accused of committing the crime—was not required to pay any fee, either. The rationale—every person enjoys the constitutional right to be presumed innocent until the contrary is proved. Requiring the respondent to pay a fee violates the presumption that he is innocent.
Likewise, a criminal accusation against a person got dismissed because there was no probable cause to charge him in court, and not because he did not pay a fee to defend himself.
Nobody in his right mind wants to be sued. That’s why if a person is sued, it is absurd to require him to pay a fee to defend himself, and in a suit he never wanted in the first place.
When Raul Gonzales was Justice Secretary during the administration of President Gloria Arroyo, the complainant was required to pay a filing fee before he can file a criminal complaint. If no fee was paid, the DoJ dismissed the case outright.
The respondent was also required to pay a separate fee of P50 to be allowed to file his counter-affidavit. If that fee was not paid, the respondent was not allowed to submit his defense, and the complaint was decided solely on the basis of the complaint. That one-sided arrangement almost always resulted in a favorable ruling for the complainant, and a criminal case filed against the respondent. In other words, a respondent could actually end up being an accused in a criminal case in court, not because there is a valid ground to accuse him, but because he did not pay the fee required for him to defend himself! Good grief!
Gonzales explained that the P50 fee was to augment the salaries of the public prosecutors of the DoJ. That was downright anomalous. Under the law, fees collected by the DoJ must go to the national treasury. The DoJ is not allowed to use those fees to augment the salaries of its employees.
Because the public protested the illegal exaction, the DoJ eventually stopped imposing fees on all complainants and respondents.
Lately, however, something stinks in the DoJ, and it’s about fees.
According to the DoJ website which already bears the photograph of Vitaliano Aguirre II, the Justice Secretary of President Rodrigo Duterte, fees are charged for just about anything which prosecutors and investigators of the DoJ are required by law to do in the first place.
For instance, a party suing for estafa has to pay a filing fee pegged against the amount of money embezzled by the respondent. If the amount embezzled is P500,000, the filing fee is P1,000. The fee increases by P10 for every additional P1,000 embezzled—the equivalent of one percent. Thus, if the amount swindled is P100 million, the complainant has to cough up a million pesos in filing fees! Yes, he has to pay a million pesos to get justice from the government!
That fee does not even guarantee a conviction. In all likelihood, the swindler will use part of the P100 million he embezzled to bribe his way through the justice system. Since he’s a crook, that can’t be farfetched.
The message that the one percent imposition conveys to the criminal world is unsettling —if you want to steal money and get away with it, steal big so the prosecution will find it impossible to pay the filing fee to bring you to justice.
Where is the justice in that? No wonder contemporary scams involve very large sums of money.
There are other anomalous fees charged by the DoJ.
One who files a motion for reconsideration in a preliminary investigation has to pay P500. Huh? What if the initial ruling in the preliminary investigation was manifestly erroneous in the first place? Why should a party-litigant be required to pay P500 for an error committed by the DoJ investigator? Is that justice?
A motion for reinvestigation costs P500, while a motion for the inhibition of an investigator costs P200. Why should a party-litigant be required to pay hard-earned money to rectify an erroneous investigation, or to cause the inhibition of an investigator who should have inhibited himself to begin with? Is that justice?
Criminal complaints involving intellectual property rights cost P5,000. That prohibitive price tag encourages intellectual piracy because most artists cannot afford that amount.
Pleadings filed in preliminary investigations have to be done under an oath administered by a prosecutor. For administering that oath, the party must pay P50. Why should one pay for his right to attest to the truth of his statements submitted to a government investigator? Is that justice?
The fee for a certified true copy of any document from the DoJ or its offices is P30 per page. Since most documents on file in the DoJ are voluminous, a party-litigant must pay almost P1000 per certified document. What happened to President Duterte’s official directive that fees for public documents should be reasonable?
The DoJ conveniently says that paupers are exempted from paying the required fees. That’s hogwash! For one to avail of the exemption as a pauper, one will have to get various notarized certificates from his barangay and other government offices attesting to his status as a pauper. Since getting those documents costs so much time and money, there is hardly any difference between one required to pay the fees, and one exempted from doing so.
President Duterte should put an end to these illegal and unjust fees, unless he is ready to admit that justice in the DoJ has a price tag.