Cabinet, Senate ready moves on VFA

MANILA, Philippines — Key Cabinet members have agreed on an undisclosed recommendation to President Rodrigo Duterte on the Philippine-US Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) as senators moved to pass a resolution that the 21-year-old pact be reviewed rather than immediately terminated.

“I can’t disclose the recommendation of the Cabinet security cluster at this time, but there was a consensus to present the pros and cons of the VFA termination to the President, notwithstanding his seeming resoluteness to end the agreement,” Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra told reporters on Viber.

‘Go to hell’

The President has repeatedly expressed anti-Washington sentiments in the past and even declared, in October 2016, that he may have to cut ties with the United States, under then President Barack Obama, because of its “lack of respect” for Philippine sovereignty.

“Instead of helping us, the first to criticize is this [US] state department, so you can go to hell. Mr. Obama, you can go to hell,” Duterte said a few months into his presidency and after Washington refused some weapons sales because the President’s antidrug war.

Last month, the President threatened to end the VFA after the United States canceled the visas of government officials purportedly involved in the detention of Sen. Leila de Lima, who is under trial on drug charges that have been affirmed twice by the Supreme Court.

Washington has given no official and public explanation why the visas were canceled.

Malacañang then tasked Guevarra to come out with a “preliminary impact assessment on the possible termination of the VFA” and the justice secretary said he would submit his memorandum after a final meeting of the Presidential Commission on Visiting Forces (PCVF) on Monday.

The PCVF is chaired by Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr., with Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana as the vice chair.

The members are the justice, interior and social welfare secretaries, the national security adviser, the VFA Commission executive director, and two other representatives appointed by the President.

Locsin, who met with US Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun in Washington on Friday, said he impressed on the United States that De Lima was charged and detained under laws that are a “mirror image of [the] US justice system” so Americans must also respect Philippine legal processes.

The VFA itself was forged to replace the US Military Bases Agreement of 1947 that was terminated by the Philippine Senate in 1992 amid several disputes on the detention of American servicemen accused of crimes in the Philippines.

But at the Senate, which ratified the VFA as a treaty in 1999, Senate President Vicente Sotto III, and Senators Aquilino Pimentel III and Panfilo Lacson are pushing for a resolution that would call for the pact’s review instead of termination. Executive agreements

The Philippines regards the VFA as a treaty, similar to the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty, but the United States considers the VFA and subsidiary agreements, like the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement of 2014, as executive agreements.

“We feel that many of our colleagues are not in favor of terminating it,” Sotto, one of the senators who voted for the ratification of the VFA in 1999, said in a radio interview. “It would be like a recommendation to the President. We’re not trying to tell him what to do.”

He said he learned from Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea that President Duterte was asking about the opinion of other sectors and the Senate could be adopted as early as Monday if it would be referred to the committee on rules and the majority leader reports it out.