Present proof vs. generals

Batas Mauricio

WITH the grave and deadly accusations made by President Duterte against five generals of the Philippine National Police, charging them as protectors of drug lords who are responsible for the proliferation of illegal drugs in the Philippines, one would think that he would right away present proof showing the culpability of the generals.

After all, Duterte is a lawyer, a former prosecutor, a former mayor and a former lawmaker, who had been trained under the principle that mere accusations would not be enough to prove the guilt of anyone, and that if one accuses another with a crime, he, the accuser, must be ready to substantiate his claims.

Yet, quite glaringly, all that Duterte did was to accuse. He did not offer any piece of evidence against any of the generals, although the accusations hurled against them by the highest officer of the land already destroyed their names, their careers, and their reputations, and sent their families agonizing in shame. With due respect, what Duterte did was, to me, the height of irresponsibility!

And, I am not alone in this perception. Lawyer Patricio Patnubay Liboon, the grand archon of the UP College of Law Sigma Rho Fraternity who inducted me as a Sigma Rhoan, decried on his Facebook timeline, the shaming and branding under the present government, because of the possibility of abuse, and of mistakes.

With his permission, I am reproducing Liboon’s post: “If I remember right, there was this point in American history where people were branded as communists and led away to prison. The idea was to keep America safe from the communists. The problem is, it was used for political and sinister purposes.

“I support Duterte’s campaign against criminality. But, shaming and/or branding is bound to be abused. Mistakes do happen too. A branded person whose reputation is sullied would have diffculty in regaining whatever was lost in the process. My two cents on this is: stick with what is time tested. Stick to the law and the observance of due process.”

My editor in a Cagayan de Oro newspaper, Herbie Gomez, chimed in: “I can’t wait to read a report about the evidence against the generals linked to the illegal drug trade. To my disappointment, I came across none as of this posting. What I see are stupid ’Tards linking the named generals to a defeated presidential candidate and the fishy Novotel gathering shortly before the elections.

“OK, so the generals were or are partisan. But why is that evidence of drug links? That merely suggests that the police generals were partisan, that they may have supported one of the President’s rivals. Now, that is suspect. If the President’s pronouncements were based on A-1 info which is likely the case, and given that he already named and disgraced these generals in public–and shamed their families, it would only be proper for him to give details. Evidence, please…”

In the radio program, my partner Vic Somintac and I hurled a challenge to Duterte and his government: disclose the details of the generals’ participation in the illegal drugs trade, to justify the public and dramatic accusation against them, made by the President no less.

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So, what should we make of the first ever executive order issued by the Duterte government on June 30, 2016 which purports to “reengineer the Office of the President” by placing several existing agencies under the supervision of the Cabinet Secretary?

Are we to consider it null and void and without any force and effect whatsoever,  in the sense that what was stated therein as the legal basis for the “reengineering” of the Office of the President, which is “Section VII of the 1987 Philippine Constitution”, could not truly be considered as a legal basis since there is technically no “Section VII” in the Constitution?

Or, are we to consider it an honest-to-goodness mistake which was made possible only by the hustle and bustle and the giddiness of a government that had just been installed, aggravated by the fumbling and bungling of its new officials, in the manner that  novices would fumble and bungle, and should therefore spare that executive order from nullification?

Whatever, many Filipinos are startled to see that this kind of a legal blunder could even happen, in a government that is now headed by a president who has been a lawyer all his life, and who is aided by numerous assistants who rose to prominence in the legal profession during the prime of their careers.

The question is now being asked: if such an egregious error could be committed in the very first executive order of the new government, the issuance of which was even much anticipated, and on a matter as simple as consolidating supervision over several government agencies under the Cabinet Secretary, what then can we expect when more important issues are at stake?

Many have tried minimizing the impact of the error in the phraseology that was used in that executive order by saying it was a mere trivial mistake, but even these people could not deny that irresponsible carelessness attended the drafting and the signing thereof, even by President Duterte himself, who appeared unable to detect the error before affixing his signature therein.

What was more embarassing here was that, it took a newsman who is not lawyer, Somintac, to point out the mistake during the first-ever press conference in Malacanang of Presidential Spokesman Ernie Abella that was then being aired on national television.

Somintac told me that when the members of the Malacanang Press Corps received a copy of Executive Order No. 1 before the presscon, almost all of them noticed right away the legal infirmity at its sixth “Whereas” clause, which mentioned “Section VII of the 1987 Philippine Constitution,” when, as we said earlier, there is no such “Section VII” of the Constitution.

Unable to bring this infirmity to Abella before he faced the media, the Malacanang Press Corps decided to send Somintac as their representative to secure a clarification. Abella subsequently promised to look into the matter, but the cat has been let out the bag, so to speak: President Duterte was made to sign an order that did not reflect the accurate legal basis and which went undetected by his Palace lawyers! Wow!

E-mail: batasmauricio@yahoo.com