Vacancies in court piling up

By Macon Ramos-Araneta | Posted on September 12, 2012 |

The Judicial and Bar Council does not need a re-tooling of the process to fill the vacancies in court, Senator Francis Pangilinan, former ex-oficio member of the council, said on Tuesday.
All the JBC needs to do is to look at the process adopted by the council under the then-chief justice Artemio Panganiban who was able to reduce the vacancies from 32% to 16%, Pangilinan said.
The lawmaker was reacting to a call made by Chief Justice Ma. Lourdes Sereno for a review of the judicial process to reduce the backlog of vacancies. The current vacancy rate is now back to 25 percent.
The Panganiban council embarked on “aggressive recruitment effort and an even more aggressive interview process so that all vacancies had the necessary list of nominees submitted to Malacanang and that there were no backlog of nominations,” the senator said.
Pangilinan said that the process regressed under succeeding chief justices, causing the vacancy rate to balloon to “unacceptable levels.”
“The workshop should review the minutes of previous JBC meetings held during CJ Panganiban’s time,” he said.
“Here they will discover that at one point the JBC interviewed up to 30 applicants daily for a period of four months, thereby speeding up the nomination process tremendously,” he said.
The target should be to reduce the vacancy rate to a single digit in a year’s time, he said. “This will require an aggressive recruitment effort where the JBC goes to the provinces to urge lawyers to take on the challenge of public service.” (END)