By YVONNE T. CHUA
JUSTICE Secretary Leila de Lima on Wednesday called on journalists to continue ferreting out the truth, saying the “sila lang iyon” syndrome is prevalent in the nearly year-old Aquino administration.
She was referring to public officials and employees who defy President Benigno Aquino III’s “matuwid na daan (straight path)” or clean government policy and would even brazenly tell people, “Sila lang iyon (It’s just them),” or that only a handful in government were living the President’s philosophy.
“They have decided to stay the old path,” including one of bad governance and mediocrity, said the justice secretary who delivered the keynote address at the Philippine Press Institute’s annual forum.
Reminding journalists of their “genetic imprints” as “mirrors of truth,” De Lima urged the news media to help pinpoint wrongdoers in government.
In her case, she said, “Kukunin ko ang salamin at ihahampas ko sa kanila (I will get the mirror and hit them with it),” implying that she was ready to file cases against them.
In her own department, De Lima said her chief goals are to improve the disposition rate at the preliminary investigation and conviction levels, enhance the integrity of her personnel and improve the Witness Protection Program.
She said the conviction rate has risen from 18 percent to 25 percent under her watch. She added that the conviction rate reaches 92 to 95 percent when witnesses are covered by the Witness Protection Program.
De Lima paid tribute to the bravery of journalists in the Philippines. She singled out the martyrdom of press freedom advocate Yu Yi Tung during the Japanese occupation and the arrest and deportation of his sons Quintin and Rizal by the Marcos government in 1970 on trumped-up charges of subversion. The brothers were press freedom fighters like their father.
“Then and now, the pen and Philippine journalists have been a dangerous combination,” she said.
She lamented that journalists continue to be kidnapped and killed, but this time “faster and in wholesale manner…at digital speed.”
The justice secretary said journalists are hated and resented because they “mirror the truth.”
“(But) bulldozing and burying the mirrors of truth is a bad idea. It never works,” she said, referring to the massacre of 32 journalists in Maguindanao in November 2009 in in the worst case of election-related violence in the country.
De Lima acknowledged it would take time to finish the case because of, among others, the dilatory tactics employed by the Ampatuan family, the principal accused in the multiple murders. “The challenge is to finish it within the term of Aquino,” she said.
