(Hong Kong, January 22, 2008) The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) today is calling upon the justice of an appellate court reviewing the sentences of five prisoners to make his decision before he retires. The prisoners have been in jail for a decade. Eight justices were earlier designated to review the sentence; however, the mandatory appellate review has dragged on for nearly eight years without coming to a conclusion.
Justice Agustin Dizon, associate justice of the Court of Appeals (CA) 15th Division, is the ninth justice assigned to review the sentence of prisoners; Lenido Lumanog, Augusto Santos, Senior Police Officer 2 (SPO2) Cesar Fortuna, Rameses de Jesus and Joel de Jesus. Justice Dizon is retiring on 27 June 2008. The date of his retirement is stated in his profile on the CA’s official website.
The five men, known as the Abadilla Five, were sentenced to capital punishment in August 1999 for the June 1996 murder of a police colonel and intelligence officer, Rolando Abadilla, during the Marcos regime.
After they were convicted by the Regional Trial Court (RTC) in Quezon City, an automatic appellate review of their sentence commences as required by law for cases where capital punishment is handed down. This review was taken over by the Supreme Court (SC) in January 2000. However, the case went on with the SC for five years without a decision being made.
Later the case was transferred to the Court of Appeals (CA) after a new ruling came out on appellate reviews of cases involving death penalty. The new rule allows the CA when reviewing cases involving death sentence to make those decisions final. However, the review by the CA has also dragged on for nearly three years without a decision being made.
“Talk about an individual’s Constitutional right to a speedy trial and to adequate legal remedies has become meaningless. There is no other mechanism left whereby prisoners can seek remedies because the system has become dysfunctional. The appellate court itself, as a last resort to provide remedy to these prisoners, fails in concluding the review promptly,” Moon Jeong Ho, AHRC’s Urgent Appeals programme coordinator.
Justice Dizon only has 156 days left from today to complete the review before he retires. If he fails to complete the review promptly and make a decision before he retires, there are serious concerns that the appellate review will once again suffer further delay. It may be transferred to another justice who would start again from square one.
This is seriously undermining the probability that the merits of the case will be given adequate attention by the reviewing justice needed to ensure that an impartial and effective review is afforded in the process. In the past, the appellate review would hardly begin before it was held up by numerous delays. There has been an emerging pattern whereby the justices inhibits from reviewing the case, unload it to another justice and so on.
“Court delays thus far illustrate how miserable the life of prisoners could become when the judicial system is not acting promptly. Hardly anything can be done apart from pushing the CA justices to do their job,” Moon added.
To help monitor and ensure that Justice Dizon would act on this case promptly, the AHRC has launched a campaign on its website, “Abadilla 5: Jailed for a decade without Justice”, which calls upon the SC and CA to ensure the review is completed and decided upon promptly.
The campaign website, which can be accessed at: http://campaigns.ahrchk.net/abadilla5/, also contains relevant documents and further details from the case. The AHRC urges any persons and groups who are concern for the welfare of the five prisoners to respond to this.
