Joma faces Dutch court anew over murder raps

Joma faces Dutch court anew over murder raps

By LOUI GALICIA
ABS-CBN Europe News Bureau

Jose Maria Sison will appear Friday before the Dutch “Raadkamer,” a kind of deliberating chamber consisting of three judges, to determine if he will remain in jail for allegedly ordering the assassination of two former comrades in the Philippine communist underground movement.

The hearing on Friday is the second stage of the investigation procedure on the murder cases against Sison.

He was arrested on August 21 for the slays of Romulo Kintanar and Arturo Tabara. Sison, the founding chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines, is detained at the Hague prison in Scheveningen.

The procedure at this stage will not be made public. The press judge from the Paleis van Justitie (Palace of Justice) in the Hague -- the only person who may speak to the public about the case -- has remained quiet about Sison’s case.

A source from the Paleis van Justitie, speaking to ABS-CBN on condition of anonymity, said that publicizing Sison's detention was uncommon.

“In normal criminal cases we practically never made that (detention) public,” the source said.

Last week, Sison was put before an investigating judge to see if the prosecution has enough evidence to keep him in jail for the next two weeks.

The hearing on Friday last week saw the judge deciding in favor of the prosecution's request to detain Sison for another 14 days.

The judge reasoned that Sison might escape by flying out of the Netherlands.

The source explained that the closed-door court proceedings Friday follows the normal standard operating procedure under Dutch law.

“In this procedure, you have an investigating stage. A man like him [Sison] should be before the investigating judge. Then he will be before the Raadkamer because you can’t have a person in prison for a long period of time. It’s kind of checked by the court but it’s still not the real public part of the procedure. It will only begin after the prosecution has done their investigations,” the source said.

“The three judges will decide if he’s going to stay a further three months. If they think there is enough serious reason to keep him during the investigation and in most murder cases, yeah, if this is the case they will do that,” the source added.

“This is in the law. If it’s a very small case, it will not be the procedure. For every defendant that’s kept in prison during the investigation, this is the standard procedure and it’s in the law,” the source said.

The source said the Sison's case is not a high-profile issue.“He’s accused of two murder cases and that’s the [heaviest] thing in Dutch law. In every murder case in town, this will be the procedure,” the source explained.

“We have had war criminals also, war criminals accused of crimes in Iraq,” the source added.

The source said that the judgment may or may not be issued Friday because the judges will still have to deliberate.

Meanwhile, Public Prosecutor Wim de Bruin sad in a telephone interview that he expects the judgement to be delivered on Monday, September 10.

The source, on the other hand, said that if the judges decide to keep Sison for a further three months, then they will seek to finish the investigation.

Investigations in big cases such as Sison's, however, usually take a long time to finish.

Cases such as these require periodic checks every three months for the accused while in detention.

“As long as the investigation is not finished, these sessions will be pro-forma court sessions.

In big cases, as they have to do a lot of investigations, it can take a lot of time,” the source said.

SOURCE: http://www.abs-cbnnews.com

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