Last Monday, President Benigno Aquino III stepped up his attacks on the Supreme Court following a virulent assault at the Makati Business Club last Dec. 1. The second attack was marked by viciousness as Mr. Aquino excoriated the head of an independent branch of government, Chief Justice Renato Corona, and humiliated him in a forum hosted by the Department of Justice, where the President was the keynote speaker.
The forum was the First National Criminal Justice Summit sponsored by the Justice Department, which invited Corona to be one of the two leading speakers. He was lured into a trap—to be slaughtered.
For the past few months, the public has witnessed an escalating confrontation between the presidency, the most powerful of the three bedrock institutions of the constitutional system, and the Supreme Court, unseen since the founding of the republic. There had been clashes between the Court and the president, but they were not as intense as the current confrontation between Mr. Aquino and a Supreme Court packed with appointees of former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who faces prosecution for alleged electoral sabotage, graft and corruption and plunder.
The simmering dispute came to a head last Monday and earlier on Thursday last week. In the last confrontation at the Manila Hotel, the President attacked the Court with bare knuckles, shedding off the civility of the relations between him and the high court. Their conflict has been fought in public forums since the President decided to engage the Court in a battle to get public opinion behind his campaign to hold past administration officials accountable for alleged corrupt practices.
In his speech, Mr. Aquino dredged up a number of high court decisions which, he said, hampered his effort to prosecute past officials for alleged corruption because the Court had rendered decisions favorable to Arroyo.
Revealing his deep-seated resentment for the Chief Justice, the President berated Corona and, in a condescending manner, delivered to him, in front of the public assembly, lectures on elementary principles of separation of power and constitutional law. In assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the criminal system, Mr. Aquino said it was important to reflect on Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution which says, “Sovereignty resides in the people and all government authority emanates from them.” He said:
“I remind you of this now because there was a point in our history when it seems we have forgotten this. During martial law, justice was not directed toward the welfare of the people, but it catered to the whims of a single person, the late President Ferdinand Marcos… My own family was a victim of this: My father was court martialed, but the verdict had already been set even before the trial commenced.
“With a court made up of magistrates, lawyers, prosecutors, and witness all appointed by the accuser, Mr. Marcos, the dictatorship exerted all efforts to skew justice and run roughshod over my father’s human rights. They took away justice’s blindfold, and tilted its scales toward their own interest.
“As President of this country, I have a sworn duty: to preserve and defend its Constitution, execute its laws, do justice to every man, and consecrate myself to the service of the nation. And part of my mandate is making certain that what happened during martial law does not happen again, and ensuring that anyone who so much as attempts to repeat the same offenses is held accountable.”
Now that Mr. Aquino is President, he has control of the secretary of justice and the prosecution service. He appoints the judges and exercises the police power of the state. And he is prosecuting Arroyo as the central target of his anti-corruption campaign and is now aggressively pursuing the action against her in the public arena—his killing fields of choice—acting as jailer, prosecutor and judge in condemning Arroyo, and the Supreme Court before the gallery of public opinion, a gallery in which cohorts of the President in civil-society, incited by his campaign, have unleashed their own campaign, calling for the resignation of Corona, and even threatening to storm the Court.
The President said from the moment he took office, “We have been laying the groundwork to get to the bottom of the allegations of corruption against the past administration.” He recalled that when he created the Truth Commission, which was supposed to look into the alleged widespread acts of corruption and to hold those responsible to account, “we had no other purpose for this than to address past wrongdoings as quickly as possible. But we all know what happened: the Supreme Court ruled that the formation of the commission was unconstitutional. From the outset obstacles had already been put in our path.”
He said Arroyo insisted on appointing Corona as Chief Justice a week after the election in contravention of the Court’s rulings that the president could not appoint any official two months before an election, except for temporary appointments when Arroyo appointed Corona in a position that was not in the executive branch but of the judiciary. “The question now is, is the Supreme Court in violation of the Constitution?”
He went on to say superciliously: “I do not have a degree in law. But I was brought up with a clear view of what is right and what is wrong, of what is just, and what is corrupt. I stand firm in my belief that justice cannot be steered toward the whims of a magistrate.”