The high recognition that environmental law pioneer Antonio Oposa Jr. received yesterday from the Washington, DC-based Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) is both overdue and welcome. Describing the awardee as “an extraordinary environmental lawyer from the Philippines,” the CIEL in a news release said Oposa was being “honored for his many distinguished contributions to the development and implementation of international environmental law in his native country and internationally.”

The annual award, begun only in 2003 and awarded for the first time to an Asian, is a prize that “recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the effort to achieve solutions to environmental problems through international law and institutions.” Individual achievement, but with an institutional bias. This means that, however fleetingly, the country’s judiciary can properly bask in Oposa’s reflected glory.

Indeed, it is only fitting that Philippine Ambassador to the United Nations Hilario Davide Jr. was invited to witness the awarding rites yesterday, in Washington. It was he who, as an associate justice of the Supreme Court in 1993, wrote the landmark decision in the Oposa vs Factoran case. It is, as even its critics will concede, a celebrated decision; if anything, its celebrity is greater in the international community, where it has been used again and again as a signpost for intergenerational equity.

The Oposa ruling is best known for recognizing the legal standing of children-petitioners in environmental cases. “This case, however, has a special and novel element. Petitioners minors assert that they represent their generation as well as generations yet unborn. We find no difficulty in ruling that they can, for themselves, for others of their generation and for the succeeding generations, file a class suit. Their personality to sue in behalf of the succeeding generations can only be based on the concept of intergenerational responsibility ...”

The CIEL announcement bookended this legal victory of Oposa’s with the other landmark ruling he is responsible for: the MMDA vs Concerned Residents of Manila Bay case, decided only last December.

“Mr. Oposa’s ten-year battle with the Philippine government to clean up and rehabilitate Manila Bay was taken up last year by the Supreme Court. The petition was filed against 12 government agencies to legally obligate them to prepare an action plan with a budget, tasking and a timetable to clean up Manila Bay. The Supreme Court, in another landmark decision on environmental protection, ruled for the plaintiff and directed all agencies to expedite the cleanup, restoration, and preservation of the Manila Bay.”

While the Manila Bay decision is a mere reiteration of the so-called Oposa doctrine allowing legal action on behalf of “generations yet unborn,” it may well prove to be the more decisive legacy in environmental law. The decision written by Associate Justice Presbitero Velasco imposes a “continuing mandamus,” ordering the various concerned government agencies to clean Manila Bay and mandating regular progress reports.

“Thus, [the Supreme Court ruled] we must reiterate that different government agencies and instrumentalities cannot shirk from their mandates; they must perform their basic functions in cleaning up and rehabilitating the Manila Bay .... Even assuming the absence of a categorical legal provision specifically prodding petitioners to clean up the bay, they and the men and women representing them cannot escape their obligation to future generations of Filipinos to keep the waters of the Manila Bay clean and clear as humanly as possible. Anything less would be a betrayal of the trust reposed in them.”

The concerned residents of Metro Manila, and future generations of Filipinos, owe a debt of gratitude to Oposa for filing the case in the first place, and then sticking with it for an entire decade.

“I am just a lawyer and I tell my story through the law. I thought that this needed to be brought to the attention of the public and the concerned government agencies,” he has said. His audience is rapt with attention—even those yet unborn.