‘Punctured’ majority decision on HLI case

“PUNCTURING ARGUMENT balloons full of hot air with cold hard needles of impeccable logic.” That is the description that comes to mind when reading Supreme Court Asociate Justice Ma. Lourdes P.A. Sereno’s dissenting opinion in the Hacienda Luisita (HLI) case. There are six balloons she pricks in quick succession (in the first three pages of her dissent)—or in her words, “legal and operational aberrations” in the majority decision.

First, she points out that the majority categorically affirmed the questioned PARC (Presidential Agrarian Reform Committee) resolutions revoking its approval of the HLI Stock Distribution Plan (SDP), and ruled as “nullified and voided” the PARC’s 1989 approval of the HLI SDP.  But having thus left legally baseless the  SDP and its operating agreement, the Stock Distribution Option Agreement (SDOA),  it then proceeds to allow (actually, require) the farmworker-beneficiaries (FWBs) to decide through a referendum whether they want to continue with it. As she puts it so scathingly, “There is not a single legal twig on which the order to proceed with the voting option can hang, except the will of this Court’s majority.”

Second, she points out that the majority ruled that the SDOA that was signed between the HLI, the Tarlac Development Corporation (TADECO) and the FWBs was not only illegal but unjust to the FWBs.  Illegal for two violations: (a) the distribution of shares of stock based on the number of man-days worked, and (b) the prolonged 30-year timeframe for the distribution of shares. Yet, the decision “allows them to remain in such a prejudicial arrangement if they so decide.” Says she: “ To allow the FWBs, the disadvantaged sector sought to be uplifted through agrarian reform, to remain in an illegal arrangement simply because they choose to so remain is completely contrary to the mandatory character of social justice legislation.”

The third aberration Sereno cites is that while the majority state that an SDOA can only be valid if the FWBs have control (i.e., a majority of the shares), they still do not require, as a condition precedent to the holding of the referendum they order, that the HLI be restructured so that the FWB share rises from 33 percent to more than 50 percent.

Fourth, Sereno states that the “doctrine of operative facts” which the majority use to justify the voting option, is misapplied in this case, because jurisprudence allows it to be applied “only in the extreme case in which equity demands it. “The doctrine of operative facts applies only to prevent a resulting injustice, if the courts were to deny legal effect to acts done in good faith, pursuant to an illegal legislation or perhaps even executive action, but prior to the judicial declaration of the nullity of the government action.”  There is no room for application of the doctrine, she says, because the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law categorically provides for direct land distribution in the event a stock distribution is not completed.

The fifth aberration that Sereno points out is that even if the doctrine above were not misapplied, it is applied wrongly, because “it should be applied in favor of the FWBs by ordering direct land distribution, because that is the inequity that continues to fester—that the FWBs who have been promised ownership of the lands they till are denied the same, twenty-three years after the passage of CARL.”

And the sixth aberration that Sereno points out is that even as the majority ruled that the issue of constitutionality of the stock distribution option should not be touched upon (for various listed reasons), it then proceeded anyway to “discuss, and even rule in favor of its constitutionality.”

Having torn the majority decision to pieces, what does Sereno want? Together with AJs Arturo Brion and Martin Villarama,  an absolute no to the voting option, but rather a straightforward distribution of the land to the tillers, who can then do with their land as they wish.  However, where the other justices want the land to be acquired at the values obtaining in 1989, Sereno wants the valuation at current prices (a difference as to when the “time of the taking” is reckoned).  On this issue, I side with the other justices.

Chief Justice Renato Corona’s dissent starts off with a bang. He begins  with a quote from the proceedings of the 1987 Constitution which he said, shows that “Hacienda Luisita has always been viewed as a litmus test of genuine agrarian reform” (emphasis his),  the essential thrust of which is land to the tiller, so that “Consequently, any law that goes against this constitutional mandate of the actual grant of land to farmers and regular farm workers must be nullified.”

He argues that the question of constitutionality is unavoidable (and thus trumps any lis mota argument), and that the four requisites for deciding moot and academic cases are present: a grave violation of the Constitution, paramount public interest involved, controlling principles are required, and the case is capable of repetition, yet evading review.

“History will be the unforgiving judge of this Court,” he warns, if it does not direct the implementation of the Constitution’s vision on agrarian reform.

Beautiful, yes?   Alas, he spoils it all at the end.  Having roared about the unconstitutionality of stock distribution, he then whimpers that the FWBs may choose to waive their rights to the land, and stay as stockholders” of HLI—“due to considerations of fairness and equity.”  To whom? Certainly not to the farmers.

A chance for greatness.  And he muffed it. Pity.