Gloria M. Arroyo as human rights victim

“Will you teach your children that Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is a human rights victim?” A friend had asked me to explain the impeachment circus and why he should care. I glanced at his 7-year-old daughter and asked him the question.

The Supreme Court declared the Philippine Truth Commission unconstitutional by invoking the human rights doctrine of equal protection. Corrupt officials in Arroyo’s administration are discriminated against because they are singled out for investigation. Translation: Arroyo and those accused of the ZTE, fertilizer, helicopter and countless other scandals are human rights victims.

The brazen intellectual dishonesty in the Truth Commission decision must shock you. Equal protection, being a human rights doctrine, is strictly applied only when “suspect classifications” are involved: race, religion and gender. Classic victims of discrimination in law and common sense include the Cordillera tribesman, the Muslim and the working woman. The Court added the overseas Filipino worker to modernize this list.

Outside “suspect classifications,” equal protection is applied with far less strictness than in the Truth Commission decision, where it all but appeared that there must be equal rights for pregnant men and women. The government is not required to solve everything at once in a robotic attempt to be equal; it is allowed to start somewhere, such as the preceding administration. When “suspect classes” are not involved, equal protection gives substantial deference to government to make reasonable classifications as it solves society’s ills, including in prosecution, even if these do not result in literal equality.

The Truth Commission decision misrepresented the equal protection doctrine so suavely it even appeared helpful, advising to add a simple “s” so the order covers all past administrations. The entire nation unfairly ridiculed President Aquino’s legal team as lightweights who drafted an order so obviously flawed. The entire nation unwittingly agreed that Arroyo is a human rights victim.

This inanity has catastrophic consequences. Chief Justice Renato Corona is also an equal protection human rights victim, claims Integrated Bar president Roan Libarios in his full-page ads, because other justices who participated in collegial decisions are not being impeached. The Marcoses are also human rights victims; the Presidential Commission on Good Government must be unconstitutional. Even ordinary criminals are human rights victims when they are singled out for investigation.

With the Supreme Court politicized, no institution is left to guard our human rights from these absurdities. The goalie has run to the field’s center to play, leaving the goal unattended. Human rights have been cheapened into bargaining chips, crude pretexts and collateral damage in the political circus. Nothing is sacred anymore.

My father is also a proud UP College of Law graduate. He taught his greatest lesson on law when I was only 6, one fateful day in February 1986. He silently told me he and my mother would be going to a place called Edsa but I could not come. In a fuzzy childhood memory, I sat in our living room wondering why the TV was showing crowds of people in the streets instead of cartoons. Only much later did I understand that had our soldiers been less principled, my parents might never have returned. That memory is now corrupted, made to stand for the new doctrine that Arroyo is a human rights victim.

Our Constitution stands with an absent protector, under assault one right at a time. In defying a Supreme Court TRO, Justice Secretary Leila de Lima claimed she could recognize exceptions to the right to travel beyond the explicit list added to the Constitution to prevent Marcos-style abuse. In rebuking Marites Vitug, UST trivialized online journalism and the freedom of the press. The Chief Justice supported the inviting of Catholic bishops to mediate between him and the President, non-establishment of religion be damned. One may even blame Microsoft Word for plagiarism. Never mind siding with President Aquino or Corona; what is crucial is to guard the Constitution from the dubious propositions so-called legal experts and amateur constitutionalists hold out as its most sacred principles. Presidents and chief justices come and go but we the people will be left with whatever mutated abomination we let our Constitution become.

The cruelest fiction is that impeachment cannot ask a justice to account for how human rights have been rewritten. This is a fiction maintained by a legal elite trained to discount the electorate as a whimsical mob and aggrandize law as a secular religion where “equal protection” is reduced to an incantation. To apply the designated check and balance of impeachment on the Supreme Court to challenge its doctrine has never meant to appeal a case by referendum. It simply means that, beyond who won and who lost, the sovereign people have the ultimate duty to rebuke the human rights doctrine they disbelieve. It simply means the Constitution’s ultimate interpretation lies not with the lawyer who wrote it but with the ordinary citizen who lives it, not with legal technicalities blown out of proportion but with resonance in daily life.

It simply means that the sovereign people, through their elected representatives, have every right in our democracy to remind unelected justices that the Constitution is too important to be left to them alone and that they have the ultimate right to take it back if they are unable to teach their children that Arroyo is a human rights victim.

Oscar Franklin Tan (oscarfranklin.tan@yahoo.com.ph) was chair of the Philippine Law Journal in 2005 and student speaker at his 2007 Harvard Law School graduation. He twice won the Cortes Prize in Constitutional Law at the UP College of Law.