One Voice expresses confidence in SC’s independence

One Voice expresses confidence in SC’s independence

Sep 27

One Voice, a multisectoral group that is against a bogus people’s initiative, expressed confidence that the Supreme Court will render an independent objective decision after it heard the legal arguments presented by all the parties to the Sigaw ng Bayan/ULAP vs. Comelec case.

Former constitutional commissioner and COMELEC chairman Christian Monsod, who chairs One Voice, observed that the justices of the Supreme Court asked tough, incisive questions which led to a substantive, exhaustive and lengthy hearing that ran from 1:00 pm to 9:30 pm yesterday.

He also commended the legal team headed by One Voice Legal Counsel Atty. Carlos Medina and the Senate led by Senator Joker Arroyo for their remarkable teamwork and the arguments they presented on why Sigaw ng Bayan’s petition should be dismissed.

Atty. Medina, who is also the executive director of the Ateneo School of Law’s Human Right’s Center delivered his arguments before the Supreme Court. A full copy of his opening statement appears below:

“6. (On) Whether the proposed changes constitute an amendment or revision of the Constitution.

6.1. Whether the proposed changes are the proper subject of an initiative.

Your Honors, allow me to begin with the words of Chief Justice Panganiban pronounced in 1997 and I quote: “[M]y position upholding the adequacy of RA 6735 and the validity of Comelec Resolution 2300 will not ipso facto validate the PIRMA petition and automatically lead to a plebiscite to amend the Constitution. Far from it.”

Why did Chief Justice Panganiban say that? Because, as he said, it was still necessary for the proponents to hurdle several questions. And the first question he posed was, and I quote: “Does the proposed change constitute a mere amendment and not a revision of the Constitution?.”

Your Honors, it is my submission that what is being proposed is a revision and not a mere amendment, and therefore not a proper subject of an initiative.

Our Constitution distinguished constitutional amendments from revisions. And this distinction exists for a reason. The heart of an amendment is simply an improvement on an existing provision or a deletion of obsolete ones. The heart of a revision is in either a change of structure or a change of fundamental philosophy. What is being proposed is a change of structure – a dismantling of the presidential system and the establishment of a parliamentary system, a dissolution of the bicameral legislature and the creation of a unicameral one. These are fundamental changes of the Constitution that require a more formalized and deliberative procedure.

Clearly, this is a revision.

The framers of the Constitution were wise men and women. They saw initiative as a complicated and difficult mode of changing the fundamental law, and therefore limited it to amendments. For how can millions of Filipinos come together to present revisions for a new structure of government without any form of organized debate? They foresaw the nightmare that can result from any attempt to revise a Constitution through an unstructured people’s initiative. We are now seeing what the framers foresaw in 1986 – a nightmarish draft of a new Constitution.

Your Honors please, I am respectfully furnishing the Clerk of Court what document will result if we follow the text Petitioners have submitted. It changes 14 articles and around 129 sections of the 1987 Constitution.

It is a mishmash of incomplete, dangerous, confusing, absurd, inconsistent, and ghost or hidden provisions. Your Honors, it even allows implied and unstated amendments.

It if comes to pass that we have such a Constitution, how are we to see light out of such a nightmare? How are we to make sense out of these inconsistencies and absurdities? We have no guide for interpretation, for there will be no records of how this so-called constitution has been arrived at.

We are being told that we cannot ignore the voice of the people. In 1997 Chief Justice Panganiban already asked, and I quote: “Is this really the voice of the people and not that of politicians?” Unquote. To borrow the cautionary words of one writer, and I quote: “If proposed revisions are not screened out of the initiative process, special interest groups may be able to commandeer the state constitution for private purposes by such tactics as paying a dollar per signature to get an initiative measure on the general ballot and conducting media campaigns with a deceptively populist feel to them.” Unquote. Are we not in fact treading already on this dangerous situation?

Your Honors, any effort at constitutional reform must ultimately strengthen our democratic institutions and uphold the rule of law for the sake of present and future generations. What (or for whose ends) do Petitioners’ proposals really serve? This is also an important question thrust before the Court. People’s initiative may have been designed to bypass the legislature, but not the Supreme Court. And the Court can only rule on the side of the fundamental law. Petitioners clearly propose to revise the Constitution unconstitutionally. They must be denied. “