MANILA, Philippines — Two former justices of the Supreme Court and several law professors of the University of the Philippines added to the growing list of petitioners asking the tribunal to void the Anti-Terrorism Act for being unconstitutional.
Retired Supreme Court justices Antonio Carpio and Conchita Carpio Morales, who is also a former Ombudsman, together with five UP professors, a former party list representative and a UP student leader filed the 11th petition against the antiterrorism law.
“The key provisions that animate the Anti-Terrorism Act, primarily the definitions of terrorism and its variants, are so hopelessly burdened by unconstitutionality. As they deserve to be expunged, the (law) will be left with nothing to sustain its existence,” the petitioners said.
They said Republic Act No. 11479, which was signed into law by President Duterte on July 3, should be declared unconstitutional because it endangered protected speech in violation of Article III, Section 4 of the Constitution.
Conchita Carpio Morales
Chilling effect
That provision states that no law shall be passed that will abridge the freedom of speech, of expression or of the press and the right to peaceful assembly.
“The Anti-Terrorism Act heavily burdens protected speech by the vagueness and overbreadth that permeate its text, creating a chilling effect that suppresses expressive freedom,” they said in their 86-page petition, which they filed by email because the court has been closed since Monday for disinfection.
They said the law curtailed other constitutional liberties such as the right to due process, to presumption of innocence, to bail, against incommunicado detention, against unreasonable searches and seizures, to privacy of communication and correspondence, to association, to public information, and the right not to be subjected to a law with retroactive effect and bill of attainder.
Antonio Carpio
Earlier petitioners
The 10 earlier petitions were filed by a group led by lawyer Howard Calleja, Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman, Far Eastern University law professors, the Makabayan party list bloc, former government corporate counsel Philip Jurado, the Center for Trade Union and Human Rights, a group led by constitutional framers Christian Monsod and Felicitas Arroyo, the party list group Sanlakas, labor unions led by the Federation of Free Workers (FFW), and the leftist group Bayan.
Lagman on Wednesday said the only remedy to the Anti-Terrorism Act is to have the Supreme Court strike it down and not merely repealed.
“This is so because the repeal would have to be made by the present Congress with the approval of the incumbent President who are the principals in the enactment of the [law] and are not expected to instantly recant,” Lagman said.
Lagman was referring to what he called was a “dubious proposal” to repeal the law if abuses occurred made by Senate President Vicente Sotto III, one of its principal authors.
“We do not have to wait for implementers to abuse the Anti-Terrorism Act because the law itself is abusive,” Lagman said.
He argued that the standard of unconstitutionality “is not the incidence of abuses but the threat to freedom embedded in the law.”
“The trite invocation that a law should be ‘given a chance’ to be implemented is off-tangent because the [Anti-Terrorism Act] has no saving grace and should not be given any chance to terrorize the people,” he said.
Greater powers
In their petition, Carpio and the others said the Anti-Terrorism Council was “an invalid entity because it was born out of a brazen violation of the rule on separation of powers and is outrageously vested with powers greater than what the Constitution has given to the President in extraordinary cases of invasion and rebellion, without the yoke of restrictions to which the President is subject.”
The council is composed of Cabinet members.
The petitioners asked the Supreme Court to allow them to argue their case in open court.
Aside from Carpio and Morales, the others are UP College of Law professors Jay Batongbacal, associate dean and maritime affairs institute director; Dante Gaymaytan, administration of justice institute director; former Supreme Court public information chief Theodore Te; Victoria Loanzon; and Anthony Yu. They were joined by former Magdalo party list Rep. Ashley Acedillo and UP Student Council member Tierone Santos.
Carpio, Morales and Batongbacal said their criticism of the Duterte administration’s inability to defend the Philippines’ rights in the West Philippine Sea exposed them to possible prosecution under the new law for supposedly “inciting to commit terrorism.”
“Carpio’s impassioned activism may, without intention, convey in the mind of the hearer the message that to preserve the West Philippine Sea for the country, the people must withdraw support from the Duterte administration by means drastic, violent or terroristic, if need be,” they said.
Polong accusation
The petition said Carpio had been accused by the president’s son, Davao City Rep. Paolo Duterte, of being part of a supposed plot to oust the President. Also, National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon Jr. called the former senior associate justice a warmonger.
The President himself had called Morales a “spokesman of the criminals,” while presidental spokesperson Harry Roque said Batongbacal and Carpio were warmongers for allegedly tempting war with China.
Gatmaytan may also be a target for criticizing the President and the administration in the course of discussing government policies in his lectures and forums. Te, who has been vocal against the drug war, was among those charged by the Philippine National Police with inciting to sedition last year. He was later cleared by the Department of Justice.
There is still no implementing rules and regulations (IRR) of the law but Interior Secretary Eduardo Año said the authorities would have to apply the law if a terrorist threat was imminent.
“If the lives of our countrymen are in danger, we have to implement it. Now, if there is no big terrorist threat, we will have to wait for the IRR,” he said on Wednesday.
Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra earlier said that it would be “more prudent” for law enforcers to wait for the IRR, but Año said the implementation rules were “not a requirement” for enforcing the law.
“There is already jurisprudence on that,” Año said.
Who would enforce it
Esperon said the first thing that had to be considered in drafting the IRR was the organization of individuals and groups in government that would enforce the law.
“It is provided in the law that we have to designate people who will be conducting apprehensions, surveillance and so, indeed, we have to create units and the people that will be manning these must be nominated and designated or assigned and trained,” he said.
“We want a fair, fast and efficient implementation of the law so we have to start with the organization itself. As of now, we simply use our trained forces. We are sufficient in that. but this time we want specific persons to be assigned to specific assignments,” he said.
He said the implementation rules would serve as a “manual that will straighten out all the doubts that you have now,” addressing critics of the law.
He assured the public that “we have all the safeguards” in the law.
—With reports from DJ Yap, Jeannette I. Andrade and Nestor Corrales