In December 2008, an Australian court allowed legally binding documents to be served on defendants using the social networking site Facebook. The debtors concerned had defaulted on their mortgage of over $100,000 and their failure to show up at the court hearing resulted in a default judgment being passed. It then fell on the pursuer to locate the debtors and serve the court papers. It is said to be the world's first legal judgment that defines a summons posted on Facebook as legally binding.
Whether a similar development would occur in Philippine courts remains to be seen. But I am for the use of the Internet to serve court processes if only to save time, effort, and resources. It will facilitate the speedy and efficient administration of justice at a lesser cost. Paper will be saved, time and human resources formerly devoted to such activity will be channeled to other endeavors, and litigants will end up as the biggest winners.
Social networking tools are fast becoming the medium of communication these days, and government would do well by getting up to speed on current social realities. Solutions to age-old problems might just be a mouse-click away.
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2 comments:
hanks for sharing this. It's very, very interesting. So interesting that I looked up some related articles.
It appears that Australian courts have also allowed legally binding service of court papers via text messaging! That would be ok in a country where almost all mobile subscriptions are post-paid (like Australia) as opposed to pre-paid subscriptions (like ours). Post-paid plans have a record of every text sent and call made. Evidently, this is not available on pre-paid plans. This is important when it comes to alleging that no legally binding service of papers (like a lien in this case) was made. One can probably make an argument by using the "last known address" and "last known pre-paid number” analogy.
P.S. The couple was eventually served by traditional means as they heard over the news that they were going to be served via Facebook and promptly deleted/made private their account. Maybe the bank’s lawyer just wanted to smoke ‘em out?
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