The Supreme Court (SC) will start accepting online applications for judiciary vacancies through the Judicial and Bar Council’s (JBC) Online Registration and Application System (ORAS).
According to the High Court, ORAS will be accessible to the public starting June 1. Meanwhile, the step-by-step guide on how to use ORAS may be viewed on the SC’s website at:
https://sc.judiciary.gov.ph/aiovg_videos/online-registration-and-application-system-oras/.
Chief Justice and JBC Ex Officio Chairperson Alexander G. Gesmundo led the launching of ORAS on Thursday at the SC’s session hall. ORAS was conceptualized by the JBC in line with the SC’s Strategic Plan for Judicial Innovations 2022-2027.
The online system will be pilot-tested and used for the upcoming vacancies in the Court of Appeals and Sandiganbayan for the two courts’ presiding justices on June 13, the SC said in a media briefer.
However, ORAS may not yet be used for applications for lower court vacancies starting May 22, the High Tribunal clarified.
The JBC is a constitutional office that accepts and screens applications, and nominates appointments to the judiciary, Ombudsman, deputy Ombudsman, special prosecutor in the Office of the Ombudsman, and the chairperson and regular members of the Legal Education Board.
“The JBC ORAS is a platform that basically took the Personal Data Sheet that the JBC requires and placed it online,” said lawyer Michelle Sharon Clara S. Domingo, chief of the JBC Office of Policy and Development Research.
Domingo added that ORAS also has features that make user experience convenient and accessible, as well as integrated to the Philippine Judiciary Platform to ensure that no bogus accounts will be created.
Lawyer Nesauro H. Firme, JBC regular member representing the Academe, pointed out how ORAS will strengthen the JBC’s task of checking the integrity of applicants to judicial posts.
“Our own personnel who had been tasked to manually encode data of the applicants can now focus on their real duty based on their plantilla descriptions, which is background investigation. This is because ORAS is created to remove the said [manual] encoding,” Firme said.
