Higher than positive law

Doesn’t Bobi Tiglao think that: 1) Mikey should not have left his ailing mom to raise money for his partisan needs; 2)  Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo should not have worn heels at the Naia; and 3) she should refute Business Insight’s repeated mention that a Dominican Republic envoy (not to Manila) saw her on Oct. 25, 2011 to discuss her asylum request?

Did San Beda miseducate Justice Secretary Leila de Lima? I don’t think so—she must be ready to lose everything, including life itself, for her convictions. I asked my Bedan law students whether they would remain in San Beda, where I have taught for years, in precept and by example, that sure there is the law, which we should all obey, but there is a “higher law” too, to which human positive law must yield. (De Lima attended San Beda when I was not on its faculty, but I am not the only there teaching in foro interno and in foro externo).

I cite Antigone, More and Aquinas, Thoreau, Peshawataro, Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Ninoy Aquino, Tanny Tañada, Pepe Diokno, Ed Olaguer, Anding Roces, et al., who obeyed human positive law, which in their view should yield to a higher law in case of conflict. The Positivists insist the law is the command of the sovereign, while we in Natural Law may, from time to time, say, “Wait a minute.”

I tell my students not to be like the German lawyer who accepted as law anything that called itself by that name and was printed at government expense to please Hitler. I did not obey: 1) Marcos after martial law was proclaimed and kept blasting his Supreme Court, 2) nor Arroyo and her Supreme Court, from 2001 to date. I urged a tax boycott in 2005, after Garci, an open defiance but I was ready to face the consequences. I was ignored. Former chief justices have gone down in history, while Enrique Fernando and possibly Rene Corona, may just go down.

I tell my students about a higher law and the need to do the right thing in the right way at the right time and for the right reason. Any justice who could say yes to the midnight appointment of Corona—despite the language and spirit of the Constitution based on the twilight and midnight appointments President Diosdado Macapagal (the poor boy from Lubao who became the rich man in Forbes) successfully disregarded and nullified—may be a menace to the rule of law.

The Supreme Court should have heard government, as much entitled to due process as is Arroyo, before issuing that TRO. Why was GMA wearing heels at the airport (which Congress named after Ninoy, without her President Cory’s signature? Arroyo renamed Clark on her own, bypassing Congress, which could have renamed it after Recto, Tañada and Diokno, who had toiled to recover Clark.

The unelected Judiciary is static, in a bivouac. The elected presidency is dynamic and receives information from all over, in its commanding heights, and can bar an Osama bin Laden-type even without a court order.

Does one really leave a badly-ailing mother being “harassed” by the administration?

How long will the Arroyos continue to abuse our patience?

—RENE SAGUISAG,

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