Free the Chief Justice

DIE HARD III

Herman Tiu Laurel

7/9/2012

Since the gates opened on the jockeying for the position of Philippine Supreme Court (SC) chief justice (CJ), the horses that have entered the race have reached ridiculous numbers.

That was the prevailing sentiment we got over lunch with some media men and politicos, where one top editor of a major daily even exclaimed, "How many are now in the race? Sixty? The noise in the jostling for the CJ post is now like a market place!"

It happened just a day after lawyers Bono Adaza and Alan Paguia, along with Jojo Borja and myself, filed a petition before the SC — at the height of last week's rains — for it to issue a "Certiorari and Prohibition with a Prayer for a TRO, Writ of Preliminary versus President Benigno Simeon C. Aquino III and the Judicial and Bar Council (JBC)" to stop the continuing malpractice of the presidential appointment of the chief magistrate, which debases and subjugates the highest judicial official of the land and the supposedly independent body he or she leads.

Sadly, there were no press or media people who covered the filing last Tuesday, partly due to the heavy rains and widespread flooding. The chief of reporters of Destiny Cable's Global News Network (GNN), for instance, texted that his people were constrained from covering the event as they were assigned to various flood relief centers. And while the same must have been true for the other media outfits, we decided to bring the campaign to the media kapihans in order to better inform the public on the issues involved.

At the Friday Rembrandt media forum, both Adaza and Paguia presented the case while I distributed a press statement announcing the launching of the Movement for Chief Justice Independence (MCJI), a campaign to generate public awareness and support for freeing the Chief Justice from presidential influence and control through the current malpractice of presidential appointment.

While the petition was jumpstarted when a number of volunteers pitched in for the cost of its filing, the media support was even more impressive.

In all the forums we pitched this proposal to, we never failed to elicit the support of all those in attendance. On the legal question, Adaza and Paguia presented indisputable evidence by first citing the provisions of the Constitution and then asking any doubters to point to any statement assigning to the JBC the power to nominate and to the President the power to appoint the CJ.

As Paguia repeatedly stresses, since it is a question of fact, all the legal doubters need to do is point to any constitutional proviso that grants such powers — when, in fact, there is absolutely none.

Thus, Adaza writes, "The reason why other Presidents got away with violating the Constitution is due to the fact that no citizen had questioned their authority. Now, there are citizens who are concerned with the rape of the Constitution by public officials and the drift of the rule of law in this country, that there is need to stop this unconstitutional practice in the national interest."

To this writer's surprise, some newspapers carried the item last Friday suggesting that our petition was dismissed, with some even saying "one down, two to go," referring to the three petitions questioning the current conduct of the nominations by the JBC. If that were true, it would only indicate uncharacteristic haste and, therefore, betray a fear of something in our petition — for how could it be dismissed in three days when the SC justices hardly have enough time to study the many petitions pending before them for close to six months?

Thankfully, a careful reading indicates that only the petition of a certain Famela Dulay, whose arguments do not coincide with ours, has been dismissed, which means that our fight goes on.

Ever since we aired our appeal for support, many more have come to our aid. In addition to all those we acknowledged in a previous column, our heartfelt thanks also go out to Mr. Poem Gratela, as well as a doctor and a rural banker who requested not to be named. We also thank this donor from Bicol who thoughtfully sent us delicacies from his native province. Rest assured that your being part of this movement fuels us to continue pursuing this case. And as we await official action, we will never be deterred by any attempt at misinformation or disinformation.

The logic of ending the malpractice of the President appointing the CJ must prevail if we are to uphold the independence of the Judiciary and the principles of "separation of powers" and "checks-and-balance." Only then can we begin to enhance the dream of an authentic democracy for our nation.

Even so, there are other advocacies that we must take the cudgels for, such as the water issue.

Last Saturday, we heard the presentation of Gloria Dalida and Rodolfo Javellana Jr. of Water for All Refund Movement (Warm) on their petition vs Manny Pangilinan, the Consunji Group, and a long list of respondents on the scam in our privatized water services, which is as huge a scam as that in the power sector. Hopefully, we'll have them on our GNN show in the coming days to link them up with all our fellow electricity advocates.

So as we jostle in the legal arena, there must be similar action in other fronts to make for a holistic and authentic democratic order. Our nation must unite against the exploitation and oppression of the local and global oligarchs, who conspire to squeeze the people into abject poverty and helpless prostration. We must not wait any longer.

(Watch Destiny Cable GNN's HTL edition of Talk News TV, Saturdays, 8:15 to 9 p.m., with replay at 11:15 p.m., this week with senatorial candidate Joey de Venecia; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com)

Interpreting garbage laws

BACKBENCHER

Rod P. Kapunan

7/7-8/2012

Looking back at that blot on our judicial history, the decision to remove the sitting chief justice of the Supreme Court indeed highlighted the country as a pariah in the international legal circle. As we Filipinos would often consider ourselves, the impeachment of Renato Corona put truism in us as "only in the Philippines."

We must bear in mind that the law used to impeach the chief justice was legislated consequent to our lunatic pretension of wanting to be known all over the world as democratically honest. We recall that ignominious event to question the idiotic philosophy that goaded the authors to make it compulsory to all public officials to declare their bank deposits in their Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth.

My lawyer-friend who is more philosophical than legalistic in his perspective began by putting forward that individuals are supposed to be punished if what has been proven constitutes a crime, meaning that even if there is no law declaring such act as offensive or injurious to society, mankind, by its desire to have an orderly and peaceful society, would nonetheless declare the commission of the act punishable.

In that infamous case, the chief justice was punished using a garbage law that in substance would not constitute an offense or a crime. It was the legislative fiat declaring such act malum prohibitum that made the act punishable, viz. that what Corona did was a diligent act a person in his right mind would normally do. His act was not mala in se that he could be punished even without a law declaring it a crime as the act is inherently injurious and contrary to civilized conduct of man.

So, by any legal extrapolation, my friend said, no amount of legislation could transform an act of any public official not to include in his SALN his bank account to a crime. It is for this that the framers of the Constitution specifically enumerated the high crimes that could be made a ground to impeach some high officials. Yet, we kicked out a chief justice not for a crime, but for violation of the capricious law, and worse, for one that does not even fall into the category of a high crime.

Since to make a deposit is accepted and a normal thing to do, that act must logically be reinforced by laws guaranteeing the secrecy of one's bank deposits, but giving room to some exception. The exception is few because that follows the same logical presumption of innocence to one who might stand as accused, and that is for the accuser to prove.

The same has been raised by my good friend-lawyer in asking why our mentally deranged lawmakers opted to pass a law declaring as a form of violence against women should a husband refuse to give financial support to his wife. Up to now many wonder about that silly conclusion of equating failure or refusal to give support as equivalent to violence. In fact, by any stretch of one's imagination, violence is the act of inflicting harm or physical pain to another, in this case to a wife. In fact, the act is already punished by existing laws.

There is no question that support is an acknowledged legal obligation. That becomes mandatory if there has been a judgment of divorce or legal separation of which the guilty party is ordered by the court to give alimony or support to the innocent spouse. But instead of fine tuning those laws to re-enforce and increase the grounds for financial support, our mentally deranged solons proceeded to interpret that as an act of violence, when the guilty party could simply be punished for contempt or defiance to a lawful order.

It is for this reason why many have been calling the laws recently passed by our lawmakers as garbage. They stand as exposition of their insanity. One could easily detect they were enacted just to boost the ego of the author, for want of anything to do, or to appease fanatical pressure groups wanting to highlight their misguided role in our society. Some of them may even be funded by foreign non-governmental organizations out to weaken our democratic institution by injecting outlandish rights that could trigger enmity among our people.

Yes, there are rights which our society should accord to women, but certainly they do not include rights that would result in the diminution on the rights of men for that could mean discrimination, and in contravention to what society has declared as co-equal. The same can be said of other pressure groups. Each has its own peculiar interest to elevate as a right. The problem is nobody has come to think that those interests could only become viable as a right for as long as they would not transgress on the rights of others.

It is for this reason why many have become apprehensive in that decision to remove Corona. Even if we take it that Corona was convicted after he waived his right, his waiver did not result in him violating the law because they remained legal. His waiver was not an act of legislation to enact a new law to single himself out. But sadly, our lawmakers failed to see that point.

A Russian 'Mir-acle?'

DIE HARD III

Herman Tiu Laurel

7/6/2012

A Daily Telegraph report noting the upturn in the talks on the Syrian crisis said, "Diplomats were clearly pleased to have agreed a peace plan, confounding the pessimists…" Indeed, such an outcome could only have come about because of strong Russian support for the Kofi Annan peace mission. And while that Geneva meeting yielded a "transition plan" through a unity government that includes all stakeholders in Syria, including both government and opposition forces, any precondition for "regime change," i.e. the removal of an elected national leader, as a way of moving forward was naturally set aside.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has expressed willingness to exit for the cause of peace if that is what his people want. Thus, China's Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, in backing the Russia plan, declared: "A plan of political settlement on the Syrian issue can only be Syrian-led … Outsiders cannot make decisions for the Syrian people."

On that score, Russian diplomacy has won the day by toughing it out on the principles of integrity of sovereign nations, in effect resisting the latest aggressive US-North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) destabilization and Balkanization of a sovereign state.

Incidentally, the Russian word for "peace" known as mir aptly describes the possible "mir-acle" of peace in Syria.

With that hopeful thought, perhaps Syria can still be saved from the fate that befell Libya, which went through the brutal "R2P" (Right to Protect) intervention of Western powers led by Italy and France (with US support and direction). Many should know that Libya, after the fall of Gaddafi and under the governance of the National Transition Council (NTC) composed of anti-Gaddafi forces, is now in a state of chaos and massive deterioration of political-economic conditions.

In a March article the Washington Post declared, "In Libya, despot is gone but chaos reigns;" and this, few geopolitical laymen realize, is precisely what the Western powers intended all along: Chaos in a country where the external power gains unlimited opportunity for exploitation.

London's Independent quoted NTC chief and Washington man Mustafa Abdul Jalil commenting on the factional (brigades) fighting: "We are now between two bitter options. We deal with these violations by brigades strictly and put the Libyans in a military confrontation which we don't accept, or we split and there will be civil war. If there's no security, there will be no law, no development and no elections."

Nine years after the US invasion of Iraq, the country is still in shambles and continues to deteriorate under factional conflict, with bombings between Shi'ite and Sunni factions (and maybe US and British covert operations disguised as either) continuing to kill and maim innocent men, women, children, and religious pilgrims indiscriminately.

On the Afghanistan-Pakistan front, Sumaira Nasir Durrani reports on Centre for Research on Globalization: "The United Nations reported that in the year of 2011 the civilian death toll in Afghanistan was 3,021 and 4,507 Afghans were wounded. According to other sources the actual number of civilian casualties was probably five times as large as the number that the UN mentioned. In Feb. 2012 the annual report on 'Protection of civilians in armed conflict' prepared by the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), acknowledged that 3,021 civilian deaths last year is an increase of eight percent than the previous year's total of 2,790."

From the Voices Web site comes this: "According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, there were 111 US/Nato Predator drone attacks inside Pakistan during 2010 resulting in 957 civilian deaths. The United Nations reports that from 2006 to 2011, an estimated 1,245 civilians have died in US airstrikes in Afghanistan … Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai, whose cousin was killed in a US night raid in March, has repeatedly condemned US and Nato drone and other airstrikes that have resulted in the deaths of civilians."

These are just some samples of the violence that US and Nato have inflicted on the countries they have intervened in to allegedly "save the people" and "establish democracy."

The real intention of the West--with the US and Britain leading the rest of Europe by the nose--comprehensively described by geopolitical analyst Webster Tarpley runs like this: "The current US policy under the Obama administration with Hillary Clinton in the State Department aims at the destruction of all sovereign states on this planet. It's really rolling the world situation back to the time before the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 which established the regime of modern independent sovereign states. The desperation of the US and the British comes from their financial bankruptcy, and what they've got to do is increase the rate of exploitation and looting and sacking of the entire world economy… (And) In the course of this, they find that any national government is an intolerable obstacle… (as) It gets in their way."

In the same way that Western powers have looted Iraq and Libya, they have done the same, if not worse, to the Philippines, by turning it into a model for their "peaceful" subversion of a nation, starting with the 1986 elite counter-revolution of Cory Aquino's Yellow horde. Today, the Philippine state has effectively been destroyed with the US-Britain's looting in Malampaya, as well as of through our privatized electricity and other public utilities.

Worse, BS Aquino III is now even into calling US spy planes to hover above what should be an Asean Sea patrolled only by Asean forces. Evidently, with such people at the helm, no "mir-acle" is yet in store for the Philippines… that is, unless drastic revolutionary change occurs.

(Watch Destiny Cable GNN's HTL edition of Talk News TV, Saturdays, 8:15 to 9 p.m., with replay at 11:15 p.m., this week with senatorial candidate Joey de Venecia; visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com)