LUCENA CITY – Exiled top rebel leader Jose Maria “Joma” Sison said the plan of a court in Manila to summon him was another useless scheme by the Duterte administration to declare the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA) rebels as terrorist groups.
“The attempt to summon me to the Philippines is malicious and futile,” Sison said in a statement from Utrecht in the Netherlands on Wednesday.
He added that the summons was “worthless and ineffective in compelling me to appear before the Manila court.”
He tagged the court summons as a “blatantly cheap political maneuver” of the Duterte regime.
In an order made public on Tuesday, the Manila Regional Trial Court Branch 19 tasked the Department of Justice (DOJ) to issue a summons on Sison after the court accepted the amended petition to trim down from more than 600 to only eight the individuals with direct links to the CPP-NPA.
However, because Sison is out of the country, the court said the summons would be served through publication in a newspaper of general circulation.
Sison insisted that as a recognized political refugee in the Netherlands, he was protected by the Refugee Convention and by Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits his deportation to the Philippines or even to a third country.
He maintained that the legal protection that he enjoys was “well tested and proven valid and effective by the legal and judicial processes that I have undergone to have my name removed from the EU list of terrorists and to cause the dismissal of the false charge of committing the alleged murder of certain individuals in the Philippines by ordering from Dutch territory alleged accomplices to commit the crime directly.” /lzb