High legal fee bars poor Filipinos from getting justice in the courts, observers say
A candidate reacts after passing the Philippine bar examination 2022. The results were announced on April 14. (Photo: Noli Cayaman)
A farmers’ advocacy group in the Philippines called on newly passed lawyers to join the public office and work for poor clients who cannot afford expensive legal fees.
The Coalition of Farmers for Agrarian Reform congratulated 3,992 lawyers who passed the 2022 bar examinations under the Philippine Supreme Court out of a total of 9,182 examinees.
The results were published on April 14.
A top leader of the farmers’ group expressed hope many of the new lawyers would join the Public Attorney’s Office to represent poor clients.
“We hope that many of the new lawyers now will serve the people by working in the government to represent causes of poor people to obtain justice,” the coalition’s Secretary General Beth Urbano told UCA News.
The state-run Public Attorney’s Office offers free legal services to impoverished clients across the country.
Urbano’s group has criticized the higher legal fees that many poor cannot afford. They fail to hire qualified lawyers and are often defeated in the courtroom.
“I defaulted on one of the required submissions or pleadings in court because there was no one to represent me. My private lawyer abandoned me when I couldn’t pay his appearance fees anymore,” Ricardo Burton, a 52-year-old farmer, told UCA News.
Burton said he went to the Public Attorney’s Office but had to wait for months until a government lawyer was assigned to represent him in a land dispute.
“It took three months until I was represented by a lawyer. At that time, my land was almost gone. A property developer has already bulldozed my property,” Burton added.
The Public Attorney’s Office has recently claimed it has won a higher number of cases in 2022 than the previous year.
“We won 248,963 in 2021 and 277,752 in 2022…This represents a 15.98 percent increase in the number of favorable dispositions for the year 2022,” the chief of the office and lawyer Persida Acosta said during a press conference in February.
Acosta also admitted an increased number of criminal cases from 256,927 in 2021 to 305,396 in 2022.
“Of the 305,396 terminated cases, 263,335, or a rate of 86.23 percent, led to favorable decisions for their clients,” Acosta added.
A farmer from Bulacan province, north of the capital Manila, however, claimed many from their group were still “underrepresented” in Philippine courts.
“There are still many from our group who don’t have lawyers because there are simply too many cases for a lawyer to handle in the public sector,” farmer Chris Domalunan told UCA News.
In February 2023, public attorney Maria Joy Filio admitted that each government lawyer had to handle around 340 cases per year.
“Right now, despite the cases, it’s still manageable. But it’s really more than what it should be,” Filio told the Philippine Collegian, the official news bulletin of the University of the Philippines.
Department of Justice Secretary and lawyer Jesus Crispin Remulla claimed that there are only 1,000 government lawyers deployed in the country.
The country’s high court has nearly 15,000 cases, and it could only dispose of a maximum of 923 cases per year, according to a Philippine Investigative Journalism report.
The Catholic Bishops’ Commission on Social Justice said obtaining free legal services for the poor has remained elusive due to a lack of volunteerism among lawyers to work for the causes of the poor.
“There are some, but they are not enough. We need lawyers who see it as a mission not a source of income,” the commission chairman and Bishop Jose Colin Bagaforo of Kidapawan told UCA news.
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