Separate Opinion
The ‘First Nation’
By Isagani A. Cruz
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 20:17:00 08/16/2008
Filed Under: Mindanao peace process, Government
THE RECENT RP-MILF AGREEMENT THAT declares the ancestral domains of the Bangsamoro as their exclusive private property brings to mind the case of Cruz v. Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources, 347 SCRA 128, where I questioned the Indigenous People’s Rights Act on constitutional grounds. Like the Ipra, the agreement grants extraordinary rights to the people living in certain designated areas of the Philippines to be governed by the Bangsamoro Juridical Entity and removed from the jurisdiction of the Philippine Republic.
My petition was dismissed because the justices of the Supreme Court were equally divided 7 to 7 and the necessary majority vote could not be obtained although those who voted for dismissal had separate arguments while their other seven colleagues were united in holding, for the same uniform reasons, that the petition should be granted. The tie was not broken on the motion for reconsideration, and my challenge to the Ipra for its legal infirmities could not be resolved on the merits.
In a separate opinion consisting of no less than 96 pages of research, then Associate Justice Reynato S. Puno submitted that the so-called Regalian doctrine giving title to the State over all lands within its territory did not cover the ancestral lands acquired by the indigenous natives even before the Spanish colonization of our country.
Justice Santiago Kapunan made the same argument in his own separate opinion that covered all of 73 pages. But he and the four other justices who sided with him, together with Justice Puno, were short of the majority vote needed to render a binding decision.
The conclusion advanced by Puno and Kapunan in the Cruz case cannot be invoked by the Arroyo administration as judicial doctrine to justify the RP-MILF agreement separating the so-called Bangsamoro Homeland from the national territory of the Philippines as defined in Article 1 of our Constitution. There is all the more reason now to resolve all the constitutional questions raised but not decided in that earlier case on the special rights granted the indigenous people that the agreement now reverently calls the “First Nation.”
With all the incredible concessions hectored from the warrior negotiators of President Macapagal-Arroyo by the MILF, it is no wonder that it is now arrogantly calling the shoddy pact a “done deal.” Despite the revolted objections of the rest of our people now reduced by the “treaty” to the status of the “Second Nation,” including many citizens in the disjoined areas who were not even consulted and are now vigorously protesting their separation from the Republic of the Philippines, the MILF and their allies from Malaysia are insolently but ignorantly celebrating their empty victory.
This shameful agreement reminds me of the best-forgotten Munich pact of 1938 that was one of the tragic incidents that ultimately led to the outbreak of World War II. In that year, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Great Britain took his first-ever airplane ride to meet with Adolf Hitler who was already blustering with his scheme of world conquest by his formidable juggernaut. The arrogant dictator easily bullied the timid statesman into agreeing to the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the German Army and its occupation of the Sudetenland. Chamberlain was hailed on his return to London for arguably manipulating what he euphemistically called “peace in our time.”
The negotiators for the Republic of the Philippines gave their craven consent to the dismemberment of our country in the interest of what the subsequently dislodged prime minister had claimed as a diplomatic coup. Actually, it was an abject surrender, which is what the RP representatives did when they signed the agreement brokered by Malaysia in favor of the MILF. Significantly, President Arroyo has not seen fit to chastise her chosen agents and must therefore be presumed to approve their cowardice, which deserves the enraged scorn and denunciation of all patriotic Filipinos.
The validity of the Bangsamoro “treaty” is now before the highest tribunal, which I hope will not dismiss the case on a technicality like the Cruz case in 2000. The constitutional issues raised in that and the present case are too important to be left hanging in the air because of judicial irresolution. As the Supreme Court held in the Emergency Powers Cases, 92 Phil. 603, “The transcendental importance to the public of these cases demands that they be settled promptly and definitely, brushing aside, if we must, technicalities of procedure.”
Whether or not Puno will revise his earlier opinion in the Cruz case remains to be seen. If he does not, his new position may exert much pressure on the present members of the Supreme Court, let alone the fact that most of them have been appointed by President Arroyo to whom they owe a great deal of gratitude. All these speculations will depend on the intellectual honesty and moral fortitude of Chief Justice Puno and his associate justices when they deliberate on this landmark case.
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