Judicial decorum

Never before,” Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona thundered, “has the entire judiciary, even in the days of martial law, been subjected to so much disrespect and lack of civility from sectors we sincerely consider to be our partners in nation-building.” At that outburst, later on uniformly described in the media as “unprecedented,” Corona’s audience of magistrates making up the Philippine Judges Association reportedly broke into “thunderous applause.” Not content with that fulsome gesture, the judges then came out with a statement declaring their support for Corona and the Supreme Court. “We are the foot soldiers of the judiciary, let the Chief Justice name the battlefront and we will be there,” said outgoing PJA president and Manila Regional Trial Court Judge Antonio Eugenio Jr.

Now we know. Judges and justices, those stern, inscrutable interpreters of the law in the popular imagination, apparently have a flair for the melodramatic, too. “Let the Chief Justice name the battlefront and we will be there?” Someone should tell Eugenio that, instead of resorting to pipsqueak martial imagery to profess his devotion to the cause of judicial pride and honor (a valid impulse, we grant), he and his cohorts in the judiciary could have put their collective voices to better use by calling for greater sobriety, sensitivity and goodwill from all sectors in the roiling debate generated by the Supreme Court’s forays into the headlines in recent days—unfortunately, most of them in an unflattering light.

The last thing the overheated atmosphere needed was talk of soldiers and battlefronts and war—the sound of a metaphorical gun, in effect, being cocked and presumably aimed at imagined enemies. Then again, perhaps Eugenio was only taking his cue from his boss. It was Corona’s rhetoric, after all, that originally huffed and puffed to feverish proportions. That slavish audience he had at the New World Hotel should have included a historian or two, to remind him how far off the mark his estimation of the Supreme Court’s fortunes then and now is.

To those who still care to remember, the Supreme Court during martial law remains the golden standard for judicial cravenness and servility, as Marcos muscled in on the country’s last bastion of freedom and integrity and reduced it, through fear, coercion and cooptation, into a rubber-stamp for his rule. The dictator’s most outrageous, power-propping edicts were uniformly upheld by the court, and those the justices didn’t dare touch they characterized as “political questions” that were outside the court’s ken. That era of vassalage reached its most shameful moment when then Chief Justice Enrique Fernando was photographed shielding Imelda Marcos with an umbrella. “To many Filipinos,” wrote journalist Sheila Coronel, “that picture of the country’s chief magistrate in a pose of undignified servitude to the unpopular sovereigns of the realm showed the extent to which the spirit of the judiciary, especially that of the Supreme Court, had been broken by martial law.”

Is there anything in the current Supreme Court’s circumstances that remotely approaches the indignities it had suffered in Marcos’ time, enough for Corona to maintain that his watch by far, only on its first year or so, already merits greater points in the annals of victimhood courtesy of those who, in his incendiary description, are out to “pervert democracy and the Constitution for their selfish political ends”? Big words. Politicians, for one, aren’t the only ones mystified by the court’s startling flip-flop in the 13-year-old case of the Flight Attendants and Stewards Association of the Philippines, merely the latest and most glaring in its increasingly alarming streak of confused and confusing decisions. Ask ordinary citizens what they think of the Corona court’s performance so far, and the Chief Justice might find himself suddenly preferring the vacuous, vastly milder volleys of presidential spokespersons Edwin Lacierda and Abigail Valte instead.

Couldn’t Corona have used one of the rare times the public was hearing from him directly to address the concerns raised about the court’s baffling conduct? He chose, instead, to play politician by throwing red meat at his audience. Corona also spoke of “judicial decorum, wisdom of silence and sense of dignity” in his speech. The words of the country’s Chief Justice, his “midnight appointment” by former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo still an unresolved drawback on his credibility, were in dire need of those same becoming qualities.