To keep up with the “Gen Z,” the Supreme Court has commendably bared its technological streak when it recently launched its “Strategic Plan for Judicial Innovation” of which I have written two successive columns. Refreshingly, however, it had not forgotten its traditional role to take care of “the least, the last, and the lost.”
THUS, TO “GIVE MORE LAW TO THOSE WHO HAVE LESS IN LIFE,” the Court has issued numerous decisions championing the rights of the teeming fringes of society (in Pilipino, “laylayan ng lipunan.”)
But today, I have space for only one of them, Aquino v. Aquino (Dec. 7, 2021), which—with the animating spirit of the birth of the Holy Child (who, strictly speaking, was conceived and born in the laylayan and outside a human marriage)—was eminently written by Senior Associate Justice Marvic M.V.F. Leonen (who, by the way, wants to include his brainchild, the “Writ of Kalayaan” in the Rules of Court, a story worth another column). In at least two ways, this decision reversed traditional norms in treating children born of parents who were not married to each other:
(1) By calling them “nonmarital children” instead of the old, pejorative, and disparaging label “illegitimate children” without amending (since it has no power to amend, only to interpret) existing laws; and more substantially,
(2) By recognizing their right to inherit “by representation” from their grandparents who died interstate, or without leaving a written “Last Will and Testament.”
INDEED, THROUGHOUT ITS 47 INSPIRED PAGES, the decision carefully avoided using “illegitimate” to describe these children without, however, changing the wording of the laws and jurisprudence it relied on to argue its cause. For the Court is only too well aware that it cannot not—however well-meaning—journey into judicial legislation.
Nonetheless, it invented the word “nonmarital” to refer to them, explaining that—aside from those with impediments to marry for having existing marital relations with others—there are many causes why children may have been born outside marriage, like when (1) one or both parents were below the marriageable age, (2) the mother was a victim of sexual assault who refused to marry the perpetrator, (3) the father may have died before the child was born, or (4) the parents, though qualified to marry each other, opted not to tie the legal knot.
When I was in law school in the late 1950s, I used to ask my favorite law professor, Edgardo L. Paras (who later joined the Supreme Court), why these children were derisively called “illegitimate” when they were born innocent and entirely faultless. I said, “Sir, I believe that in reality, and in fact, there are no illegitimate children, only illegitimate parents.” And he would smile and reply, “I agree. So, please aspire to be a future legislator and amend the law.”
THE GRANT OF INHERITANCE TO NONMARITAL CHILDREN from the estate of grandparents was more difficult to tackle. From the time the Spanish conquistadores imposed the Spanish Civil Code in this blessed “land of the morning,” children born outside lawful wedlock have always been discriminated against by the law and by their relatives and friends. This scornful situation was continued by the new Civil Code enacted by our independent Republic in 1950, going even further by classifying illegitimate children into “natural children,” “natural children by legal fiction,” and “spurious children.”
The Family Code—issued in 1988 by President Corazon Aquino with the use of her revolutionary powers—limited the classification into two: legitimate and illegitimate, but allowed many parts of the Civil Code on the status of children to remain.
One of these remaining parts is Article 992 which provides, “An illegitimate child has no right to inherit ab intestato from the legitimate children and relatives of his father or mother; nor shall such children or relatives inherit in the same manner from the illegitimate child.”
In the past, this rule has been described as an “iron curtain” that divides the legitimate from the illegitimate because it prohibits them from inheriting from each other. Over the centuries, this iron curtain has bred antagonism, hate, and bitterness among them.
The present decision partly shattered this iron curtain by ruling that children “regardless of the circumstance of their birth, [are] qualified to inherit from their direct [ascendants]—such as their grandparent—by their right of representation. Both marital and nonmarital children, whether born from a marital or nonmarital child, are blood relatives of their parents and other ascendants.”
Citing general policies and principles of the 1987 Constitution as well as several recent international treaties and covenants promoting child welfare, the Court courageously held, “We are not duty bound to uncritically parrot archaic prejudices and cruelties, to mirror and amplify oppressive and regressive ideas about the status of children and family life. The best interest of the child should prevail.”
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