Rule of law should prevail

The Bill of Rights enshrined in the Constitution—past and present—of the Republic of the Philippines, takes precedence over all other provisions thereof. Every public official before he assumes his duties takes an oath to “preserve and defend the Constitution,” not the “prosecution.”

The trouble with government lawyers is, they forget that all persons, before conviction, are as a matter of right presumed innocent. This is the rule of law.

The provisions of the Bill of Rights are self-executing and are demandable anytime. It is for the party who argues against the enjoyment and exercise of these rights to prove that there is urgent need for their curtailment.

As public officials, the president and the justice secretary should be the first to set an example in protecting and defending the individual rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. It is ironic that the son of Ninoy Aquino, who fought and died for these individual rights, now leads in violating the Bill of Rights.

Almost 80 years ago, an author of the 1935 Constitution, Claro M. Recto, commented on violations of constitutional guarantees: “Isolated infractions if left uncorrected may in time become a chronic condition. If the constitution is allowed to be violated in one provision, it will easily be violated in another provision. If the constitution is suspended as to one group of citizens, it can be suspended as to another group of citizens. If one department can invade and usurp the powers of another, so can it invade the totality of power.”

Recto then admonished: “None of us can be sure that he will have no need of the constitution; it behooves us all therefore to protect and preserve it for an evil day. The very persons who now defy the constitution or allow it to be subverted and undermined without protest, may themselves cry out for its protection tomorrow, and bewail the loss of the guarantees that they themselves destroyed or denied to their enemies…”

And then, he wound up his speech with serious foreboding, expressed in the following language: “Neither in the toils of the day nor in the vigils of the night can the sentinels of the constitution relax their vigilance. Let us all be wary and stand up by our arms, set by culpable tolerance or by criminal negligence, our country should in some forbidding future become a desolate Carthage, wherein only the naked ruins of our republic shall remain, fallen monuments of the past in whose debris our descendants, by then forlorn bondsmen of some corrupt despot, shall in vain endeavor to decipher the language of the constitution, inscribed as in forgotten hieroglyphs, on the sarcophagus of our dead freedoms.”

Today is that evil day. I join the eight justices who voted for the issuance of the temporary restraining order.

—HECTOR REUBEN D. FELICIANO,1614 San Lazaro St., Sta. Cruz, Manila