Senators mixed about online regular sessions – Sotto

MANILA, Philippines — The Senate is scheduled to open its regular sessions on May 4, but the enhanced community quarantine remains in effect all over Metro Manila until May 15. There were proposals to hold it online, but senators are divided on this.

“Some of them want it. There are those who are not comfortable,” Senate President Vicente Sotto III told INQUIRER.net in a Viber message on Friday when asked if there had been proposals from senators to conduct sessions via teleconferencing.

Senate Majority Juan Miguel Zubiri is one of the senators who backed holding online sessions to prevent risking the health and safety of senators and their staff.

“I fully support some of our colleagues push for sessions via teleconferencing which is now done in many parliaments around the world during this pandemic,” Zubiri said in a message to reporters.

“First of all there is no public transport and 80% of the 3,000 employees of the senate use public transport, therefore, have no means of going to work every day,” he added.

Once session resumes, Zubiri said the Senate would need to operate with a skeleton staff.

“We don’t want to also put our senators at unnecessary risk as we have members that have underlying medical conditions and even if some won’t admit it is senior citizens of which even the (Inter-agency Task Force) considers under its priority stay home orders,” he added.

Aside from Zubiri, two other senators have tested positive for the coronavirus, namely Senators Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel III and Sonny Angara.

“The last thing we want to do is expose our members, staff and Secretariat personnel in the legislature and make it spread like wildfire towards the communities where they live,” Zubiri said.

“That will not only defeat the purpose of the quarantine lockdown but will put more of our medical personnel at risk and further fill up our strained medical facilities,” he also said.

A Senate resolution seeking to allow senators to hold sessions via teleconferencing has already been drafted, Zubiri said.

This draft resolution, he added, will be routed to senators over the weekend “for further comments and amendments” and will be tackled on May 4.

Should senators reach a consensus on holding sessions through online or teleconference, video equipment at the Senate can be tweaked to “set up Zoom like conferences with our members and Secretariat officers to conduct our business for the day,” according to Zubiri.

All video conference would be “strictly” recorded and would be considered as part of the Senate’s data and archives, he added.

“While we await a vaccine for this deadly virus and the spread of this disease continues, this may be the new normal for the meantime,” Zubiri said.

But Sotto said the matter on how the Senate would conduct its sessions amid the quarantine is still up for discussion.

“There might be legal and other questions later so it’s best that we discuss it first,” the Senate leader said, maintaining that the upper chamber of Congress will convene on May 4 despite the extended quarantine.

Earlier, Angara said there were “strong opinions” among senators to postpone “actual, physical sessions” once Congress comes back from its two-month break as the country scrambles to contain the spread of the virus.

Another option, Angara also said, is for the Senate to conduct a “hybrid” session.

“It’s just the Senate President, the majority leader and a few members present…meaning it’s kind of a mix. A hybrid session of partly physical presence and partly virtual presence,” he said during a teleconference with reporters on Thursday.

President Rodrigo Duterte earlier placed the entire Luzon under an enhanced community quarantine as cases of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in the Philippines continued to increase.

Initially, the quarantine was supposed to lapse on April 13 but the President extended the lockdown period to April 30.

The enhanced community quarantine was then extended for another 15 days in Metro Manila, and other several “high risk” areas in Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao.

To date, there are so far 6,981 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the Philippines. Of the number 722 have recovered while 462 have died.

KGA