Judiciary to receive lowest budget next year

Supreme Court of the Philippines. Photo by Mike Gonzales courtesy of Wiki Commons.

MANILA — The judicial branch is set to have the lowest percentage share in the annual appropriation next year.

A proposed budget submitted to the Congress by the executive branch indicated that the Supreme Court will be having an additional P900 million, but is actually the lowest it will be having in the recent years.

The budget represents only 0.65 percent of the total P2.606-trillion national appropriation – down from its current share of 0.8 percent, an official of the high court explained in a Philippine Star report.

A Supreme Court official was cited in the same report to have lamented on how the executive department has rejected their request for funding of important judiciary projects.

“The DBM did not put any fund – meaning zero – on many items that the SC asked for,” the official said, as quoted in the same report.

Under the 2015 proposed budget, the regional and metropolitan trial courts will receive an increase in funding from P16.408 billion to P17.366 billion.

It would be noted that the proposed budget came several weeks after the Supreme Court declared several parts of the administration’s Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) to be unconstitutional.