MANILA, Philippines -- (UPDATE) The Supreme Court could still reverse its ruling that executive privilege holds when it handed down a judgment on a petition filed by Commission on Higher Education chair Romulo Neri, according to the tribunal’s spokesperson.

Spokesperson Jose Midas Marquez said the Senate might still file a motion for reconsideration and if senators were able to provide new or better arguments, the justices might be persuaded to change their opinion on the case.

“We can say that there may still be a reversal, considering that the voting was 9-6, and two of the nine justices only concurred in the result. So we can say there’s a big hope that the voting will be different when the motion for reconsideration is filed,” Marquez told reporters.

In the history of the Supreme Court, however, en banc decisions like the one given on the Neri case are rarely reversed by the same set of justices.

While holding out hope of a reversal, Marquez at the same time rejected claims that the justices yielded to political pressure in coming out with the decision that Malacañang hailed as a victory.

Seeming to echo Marquez, Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez said that any motion for reconsideration would be useless and futile.

“I cannot read the minds of the justices but I think a motion for reconsideration may be of not much value. This is a decision of the entire court en banc. This is not the decision of a division,” Gonzalez told reporters also Friday.

But the Senate appears set to ask the Supreme Court to change its decision upholding the right of Neri to invoke executive privilege when he appeared before a Senate investigation.

“The issue here is not whether we will summon Neri or not,” Senate President Manuel Villar said. “What is important here is the position of the Senate as an institution. We will not allow the Senate to be treated this way because our power is stated in the Constitution.”

Senator Alan Peter Cayetano, chair of the joint panel investigating possible corruption in the executive branch that summoned Neri to testify, said that senators had come out from the consultations with a stronger determination to file a motion for reconsideration.

But Senator Mar Roxas, co-chair of the joint committee, did not share his peers’ optimism that the justices would reverse their decision.

“The MR is more of a pro-forma than a real expectation of a change of mind,” he said.