🏠 Homepage | ChannelStatement on the Proposed Anti-terrorism Act of 2020Posted: 04 June 2020
By: Meilou Sereno Official FB Page
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Our people need to hear our lawmakers ask the most important questions about our survival as a nation and the future of our freedoms under the proposed Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020. Until these questions are asked and the answers clearly given, it is the most unfortunate of times to pass the proposed act (presently Senate Bill No. 1083). The proximity of the number of the senate bill to Proclamation No. 1081 signed in 1972 by then President Ferdinand Marcos uncannily recalls for me the dark days of Marcos’ Martial Law. Our people must keep in mind that not a single claim of the long-term benefits of that martial law regime has been validated by the Supreme Court. To the contrary, the wide-scale plunder and suffering of the people and the economy are sufficiently recorded in several of its decisions. Local insurgencies were not suppressed, and our neighbors outstripped us in both human development and hard infrastructures.
In my former capacity as Chief Justice, I had listened carefully to the articulated difficulties that the defense and military establishment had in dealing with terrorism under the Human Security Act of 2007 or RA 9372. I had expressed the judiciary’s intention to ensure that operationally, courts were not going to stand in the way of the successful implementation of the nation’s anti-terrorism programs. It was then my view, that those problems could be resolved if agency agreements between the Executive Department and the Judiciary could be crafted, that take into account the agencies’ implementation difficulties vis-a-vis the required careful culture of courts whose primary function is to defend human dignity and the rights of every Filipino. The Supreme Court, unfortunately, never had the chance to pass upon the constitutionality of the substantive portions of the Human Security Act of 2007.
The extraordinary restrictions on movement of people under the quarantine protocols is already a major concession to government. Matiisin ang Pilipino, but this should not be abused; and when Filipinos vent their frustration in the only way they can through social media, government should be careful not to repress the human spirit that must always find a way to express itself. This is the key principle of our constitutional rights – that we are called by God to freedom, to pursue human flourishing, and we owe the human family respect for divergent views.
This is the reason why the government exists in the first place, to act as agents with delegated power from the sovereign Filipino people, to enable the people to build a “just and humane society.”
When government leads the people to injustice and to inhumanity, then the whole basis for that authority morally erodes.
That is why Congress must, in this perilous hour when national existential questions are uppermost in the minds of the people, make the effort to ask those questions and not stop, until the present bill satisfies the standards of justice and human compassion.