REPUBLIC vs. CFI MANILA and MAYER STEEL PIPE CORP.

Citation:  G.R. No. 43747; September 2, 1992; Ponente:  Nocon

Doctrine:  Application of the Doctrine of Primary Jurisdiction – The question of forfeiture of the properties sought to be imported is for the Collector of Customs to determine and then by the Commissioner of Customs.  Thereafter, appeals must be brought to the Court of Tax Appeals.

FACTS:

In November 13, 1975, the CFI of Manila issued an injunction enjoining the Collector of Customs (Collector) from enforcing an order to seize some packages of machinery from the Private Respondent, Mayer Steel Pipe Corporation. 

The complaint with the CFI alleged the lack of due process in the proceedings leading to the order.

ISSUE:

Whether or not the CFI has the jurisdiction to issue an injunction over the order of the Collector.

HELD:

The mandate of the law is very specific.  Section 2312 of the Tariff and Customs Code provides:

"SEC. 2312. Decision or Action by Collector in Protest And Seizure Cases. — When a protest in proper form is presented in a case where protest is required, the Collector shall issue an order for hearing within fifteen (15) days from receipt of the protest and hear the matter thus presented. Upon the termination of the hearing, the Collector shall render a decision within thirty (30) days, and if the protest is sustained, in whole or in part, he shall make the appropriate order, the entry reliquidated if necessary."

On the other hand, Section 2313 of the same law states:

Review by Commissioner. — The person aggrieved by the decision or action of the Collector in any matter presented upon protest or by his action in any case of seizure may, within fifteen (15) days after notification in writing by the Collector of his action or decision, give written notice to the Collector and one copy furnished to the Commissioner of his desire to have the matter reviewed by the Commissioner. Thereupon the Collector shall forthwith transmit all the records of the proceedings to the Commissioner, who shall approve, modify or reverse the action or decision of the collector and take such steps and make such orders as may be necessary to give effect to his decision.

Section 7 of R.A. No. 1125 (An Act Creating the Court of Tax Appeals) also provides:

Jurisdiction — The Court of Tax Appeals shall exercise exclusive appellate jurisdiction to review by appeal, as herein provided —

x       x       x

(2) Decisions of the Commissioner of Customs in cases involving liability for customs duties, fees or other money charges; seizure, detention or release of property affected: fines forfeitures or other penalties imposed in relation thereto; or other matters arising under the Customs Law or other law or part of the law administered by the Bureau of Customs.

Clearly then, the question of seizure and forfeiture is for the Collector of Customs to determine in the first instance and then the Commissioner of Customs. This is a field where the doctrine of primary jurisdiction controls. Thereafter an appeal may be taken to the Court of Tax Appeals. A court of first instance is thus devoid of competence to act on the matter.

Lastly, in the case of Enrile vs. Vinuya, it was held that “the prevailing doctrine is that the exclusive jurisdiction in seizure and forfeiture cases vested in the Collector of Customs precludes a court of first instance from assuming cognizance over such a matter.”

As regards to the allegation that there was violation of due process, the Court noted that there was a hearing with 6 witnesses and for the purposes of administrative proceedings.

Wherefore, the order of injunction issued by the CFI of Manila was annulled.

WORST INK STILL BETTER THAN THE BEST MEMORY?

When you snap a picture with your cellphone or digital camera, what do you do with it?  Do you still have it “developed”?  When your company asks for a report, do you still print it out or would it exist only in some computer or backed up in Dropbox or some cloud storage?    When you read a book, “do you read it off the screen just like everyone else” or do you still flip through pages like they did in days of old?

Argentine Humanist Alberto Manguel had this to say:

Even the newer electronic technologies cannot approach the experience of handling an original publication. As any reader knows, a printed page creates its own reading space, its own physical landscape in which the texture of the paper, the colour of the ink, the view of the whole ensemble acquire in the reader’s hands specific meanings that lend tone and context to the words. (Columbia University’s librarian Patricia Battin, a fierce advocate for the microfilming of books, disagreed with this notion. “The value,” she wrote, “in intellectual terms, of the proximity of the book to the user has never been satisfactorily established.” There speaks a dolt, someone utterly insensitive, in intellectual or any other terms, to the experience of reading.)

But above all, the argument that calls for electronic reproduction on account of the endangered life of paper is a false one. Anybody who has used a computer knows how easy it is to lose a text on the screen, to come upon a faulty disk or CD, to have the hard drive crash beyond all appeal. The tools of the electronic media are not immortal. The life of a disk is about seven years; a CD-ROM lasts about ten. In 1986, the BBC spent two and a half million pounds creating a computer-based, multi-media version of the Domesday Book, the eleventh-century census of England compiled by Norman monks.

More ambitious than its predecessor, the electronic Domesday Book contained 250,000 place names, 25,000 maps, 50,000 pictures, 3,000 data sets and 60 minutes of moving pictures, plus scores of accounts that recorded “life in Britain” during that year. Over a million people contributed to the project, which was stored on twelve-inch laser disks that could only be deciphered by a special BBC microcomputer. Sixteen years later, in March 2002, an attempt was made to read the information on one of the few such computers still in existence. The attempt failed. Further solutions were sought to retrieve the data, but none was entirely successful. “There is currently no demonstrably viable technical solution to this problem,” said Jeff Rothenberg of the Rand Corporation, one of the world experts on data preservation, called in to assist. “Yet, if it is not solved, our increasingly digital heritage is in grave risk of being lost.”  By contrast, the original Domesday Book, almost a thousand years old, written in ink on paper and kept at the Public Record Office in Kew, is in fine condition and still perfectly readable.

The director for the electronic records archive program at the National Archives and Records Administration of the United States confessed in November 2004 that the preservation of electronic material, even for the next decade, let alone for eternity, “is a global problem for the biggest governments and the biggest corporations all the way down to individuals.” Since no clear solution is available, electronic experts recommend that users copy their materials onto CDs, but even these are of short duration. The lifespan of data recorded on a CD with a CD burner could be as little as five years. In fact, we don’t know for how long it will be possible to read a text inscribed on a 2004 CD. And while it is true that acidity and brittleness, fire and the legendary bookworms threaten ancient codexes and scrolls, not everything written or printed on parchment or paper is condemned to an early grave. A few years ago, in the Archeological Museum of Naples, I saw, held between two plates of glass, the ashes of a papyrus rescued from the ruins of Pompeii. It was two thousand years old; it had been burnt by the fires of Vesuvius, it had been buried under a flow of lava—and I could still read the letters written on it, with astonishing clarity. (footnotes omitted)

The Beauty of Books 

Manuscripts and typescript drafts can easily be read if they are found.  You will also be able to find a wealth of meaning by examining various versions of the manuscript versus the published version.  But the ephemeral nature of electronic word processing makes it difficult to find the same level of textual analysis from authors.  With the advent of electronic composition and storage of books is the elimination and disappearance of drafts.  In the past, an author would make a series of drafts before coming up with a final manuscript.  Historians, hagiographers, biographers and other academics would find these drafts a very rich source of what the author was trying to write and what he was trying to say.  Remember José Rizal's lost chapter in the Noli Me Tangere, a chapter thatwas later included in some critical editions.  Jefferson's drafts of the declaration of liberty have been examined over and over again by historians and political scientists seeking to “get into Jefferson's brain.”  In this blog, I have an ongoing project to write a study guide of Los Pájaros de Fuego, the “lost novel” of José Balmori, is based on the critical edition of Isaac Donoso which contains glosses of previous drafts of the novel.

There are legal implications as well.  In the Philippine setting, legal instruments are, without exception, paper documents.  For example, there is no such thing as a “video will”.  In other legal traditions, we have the UK Parliament, where a law is only formally passed once it is printed in parchment.  Indeed, the durability of parchment and ink and paper and ink is not something we can easily replicate with the electronic medium.

What is the legal status therefore, of so called “electronic titles”?  Of late, the Land Registation Authority (LRA) has been digitizing the land records of our country.  Basically, all physical titles on file with the LRA are scanned and kept in a server somewhere in Scandinavia.¹  A law professor discussed that these electronic titles have no legal status.  The only title to land in the Philippines is the physical certificate of title on file with the LRA, and thus the title can still be physically destroyed and the scanned copy on file somewhere in Norway cannot simply replace the physical title. 

Imagine also if something were to happen to the hard drive in Norway, and everything up in the cloud were to suddenly disappear—all of the precious digital-only land title system would be in complete disarray.  People had a big row if Facebook or Instagram would suddenly go down and all of their precious pictures and memories with it, how much more the indefeasibility of a person’s ownership of a parcel of land?

The Feared Blue Screen of Death

What do you guys think?  Paper or electronic?

Footnotes:

[1] This is just an example, but many servers are located in Scandinavia to take advantage of cold weather to save on airconditioning costs.

FORTICH vs. CORONA

289 SCRA 624, April 24, 1998

TOPIC:  Finality of Judgement; Administrative Law

DOCTRINE: The orderly administration of justice requires that the judgements/resolutions of a court or quasi-judicial body must reach a point of finality set by the law, rules and regulations; a resolution which substantially modifies a decision after it has attained finality is utterly void. When an administrative agency's decision becomes final and executory and no one has seasonably filed a motion for reconsideration thereto, the said agency has lost its jurisdiction to re-open the case, more so modify its decision.

FACTS:

On March 29, 1996, the Office of the President (OP) issued a decision converting a large parcel of land from agricultural land to agro-industrial/institutional area. Because of this, a group of farmer-beneficiaries staged a hunger strike in front of the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) Compound in Quezon City in October 9, 1997. The strike generated a lot of publicity and even a number of Presidential Candidates (for the upcoming 1998 elections) intervened on behalf of the farmers.

Because of this “blackmail”, the OP re-opened the case and through Deputy Executive Secretary Renato C. Corona issued the so-called, “politically motivated”, “win-win” resolution on November 7, 1997, substantially modifying its 1996 decision after it had become final and executory.

ISSUE: WON the “win-win” resolution, issued after the original decision had become final and executory, had any legal effect.

HELD:

No; When the OP issued the Order dated June 23,1997 declaring the Decision of March 29, 1996 final and executory, as no one has seasonably filed a motion for reconsideration thereto, the said Office had lost its jurisdiction to re-open the case, more so modify its Decision. Having lost its jurisdiction, the Office of the President has no more authority to entertain the second motion for reconsideration filed by respondent DAR Secretary, which second motion became the basis of the assailed “Win-Win” Resolution. Section 7 of Administrative Order No. 18 and Section 4, Rule 43 of the Revised Rules of Court mandate that only one (1) motion for reconsideration is allowed to be taken from the Decision of March 29, 1996. And even if a second motion for reconsideration was permitted to be filed in “exceptionally meritorious cases,” as provided in the second paragraph of Section 7 of AO 18, still the said motion should not have been entertained considering that the first motion for reconsideration was not seasonably filed, thereby allowing the Decision of March 29, 1996 to lapse into finality.  Thus, the act of the Office of the President in re-opening the case and substantially modifying its March 29,1996 Decision which had already become final and executory, was in gross disregard of the rules and basic legal precept that accord finality to administrative determinations.

The orderly administration of justice requires that the judgments/resolutions of a court or quasi-judicial body must reach a point of finality set by the law, rules and regulations.  The noble purpose is to write finis to disputes once and for all