Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile and Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago yesterday demolished arguments coming from fellow senators and allies of President Aquino in their bid to have Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona recuse from participating in all the cases involving former President Gloria Arroyo.
Enrile dismissed Corona critics’ charges that the chief justice was a “midnight appointee” of the former president and a favored one.
In light of the growing call for the inhibition of Corona from Arroyo’s cases as well as those urging him to resign, Enrile said he had studied the legal basis of the SC chief justice’s appointment, explaining that “if Arroyo did not appoint a chief justice at that time, then there would have been no Judicial and Bar Council (JBC). You could never constitute a JBC
even after the President has been replaced because the presiding chairman of the JBC, who must select a replacement for the position of (then resigned SC Chief) Justice (Reynato) Puno, was the JBC.
“They were the ones to process. And if there was no chief justice at that moment, how can you appoint a chief justice, if Gloria (Arroyo) did not appoint a chief justice?”, he pointed out, recalling that those “crucial times” in the country’s history came at a time when Puno was due to retire just as a presidential election was forthcoming.
“It is my opinion that the appointment of a chief justice, did not have to pass through the Judicial and Bar Council. In fact, under the present Constitution, if they (Corona critics) will analyze it very carefully, the President, whether it is Gloria Arroyo or Noynoy Aquino, or somebody else in the future, when a similar situation like what happened in the case of the retirement of Renato Puno will take place, you will have to select a Chief Justice from the people who are already inside, because if the Chief Justice is out and there is no Chief Justice, you cannot convene the Judicial and Bar Council. Like the Senate President. The Senate President is the chairman of the Commission on Appointment. If you have no Senate President, that body cannot be convened,” he pointed out to reporters.
“What I am trying to caution everybody, is that we must be very, very careful in dealing with this problem because there is an international audience watching us, how we conduct democracy in this country, and we are supposed to be the first democratic republic in South East Asia. I hope that we protect that image. While the three branches differ in opinion, I think we should approach the difference in a more benign and cautious manner in order not to hurt the national interest,” he added.
Enrile also stressed that the the issue on Corona being biased in favor of Arroyo because she had appointed him and made him the head of the SC does not hold water.
“If the thesis is correct that all appointees of the president must be inhibited when it concerns cases involving that president, then all of those justices in the SC will have to inhibit themselves, those who were appointed by the former President. Then you have no Supreme Court. What kind of a system are we going to have?” he asked, adding that he speaks of the logic of the proposition.
“I am not defending anyone here. I am just scrutinizing the logic of the proposition that if a person is appointed by a president, you assume already that that person is loyal to that president. If that is true in the case of Arroyo, then it must be true in the case of the other justices, the appointees of the incumbent President, such as Justice (Lourdes) Sereno, Justice Bernabe, Justice Reyes.
“All the justices, based on that presumption, the other Justices will be partial to the former President. I don’t think that is a correct presumption. There must be concrete evidence to be presented to show the bias of the person the Justice in favor of the accused whose case is being considered in that Court. That is a matter of fact,” Enrile explained.
The Senate chief said it’s only normal for the people to disagree with anyone who has the power to make decisions, to challenge the independence, impartiality, and fairness of the judge.
“But in the end, it will all depend on the judge to decide whether he can live with his conscience in dealing with the issue before him. That is also true in the case of the Senate,” he said.
Senator Santiago, for her part, joined Sen. Francis “Chiz” Escudero in criticizing those who continue to call for the inhibition of Corona, describing as “arrogant and supercilious” the efforts of a certain group to force the chief justice to refrain from participating in hearing Arroyo’s cases.
“This group (referring to the group called Bantay Gloria, led by Akbayan’s Risa Hontiveros and Leah Navarro) is suffering from doctrinal confusion on the nature of a tripartite democracy. They want to be higher than the Supreme Court. It is improper for the political branches (executive and legislative) to influence the judicial branch. But this group thinks that it is a fourth branch. You have to admire their hubris,” she said.
Santiago insisted that pressuring any judge or justice to inhibit himself directly violates the principle of independence of the judiciary.
“Those crying for the inhibition of the Chief Justice are trying to be a law unto themselves. They seek no less than the unconstitutional power to determine who will judge what cases. The Constitution does not grant that power to anybody, no matter how strident or self-righteous,” she said.
“If a howling mob is allowed to pressure the chief justice or any justice to inhibit, that would serve as a calamitous precedent. Any litigant would then be able to pressure an impartial judge to inhibit, in order to obtain a group decision from the substitute,” she said.
Santiago noted that the senior associate justice, although an Arroyo appointee, proved in his later decisions to be an arch-critic on Gloria Arroyo.
“In effect the pressure on Corona to inhibit is an effort to substitute him with Carpio. If it can be said that Corona might be biased in favor of Arroyo, it can also be said that Carpio might be biased against Arroyo. We cannot allow the composition of the Supreme Court in a certain case to be determined by an unelected exterior group on the basis of the group’s own political biases,” she said.
Santiago issued a statement from New York, where she is campaigning as the Philippine candidate to the International Criminal Court. –Angie M. Rosales, Daily Tribune
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