Legal luminaries hit people’s initiative, corruption in Cha-cha bid

MANILA, Philippines—Legal luminaries on Thursday questioned the validity of the people’s initiative to amend the 1987 Constitution and pointed out that corruption is the main obstacle to economic growth.

According to former Supreme Court Chief Justice Reynato Puno, the use of people’s initiative was “futile.”

“The use of people’s initiative to amend the Constitution is turning out to be an excruciating exercise in futility,” Puno said at a public forum on charter change titled “Do We Need Charter Change?” organized by the think tank Center for People Empowerment in Governance.

Puno was joined by lawyer Rene Sarmiento, a member of the 1986 Constitutional Commission, and economist Emmanuel Leyco.

Sarmiento said that amending the economic provisions of the Constitution does not guarantee that foreign investors will come to the country.

“Foreign investors will not come because of the lax or liberal economic provisions. We have a survey done in 2022, a CEO survey, meaning chief executive officers, conducted from July to August 2022 by the PricewaterhouseCooper Philippines and the Management Association of the Philippines, 67 percent of the 119 business leaders ranked corruption as the number one economic obstacle. There was no mention of provision, or economic provision in the Constitution,” Sarmiento said.

“As held by the Supreme Court, people’s initiative cannot be used to revise, but only to amend the Constitution. Further, Republic Act 6735, the law that implements people’s initiative, is too restrictive, […] to launch a people’s initiative,” Puno added.According to RA 6735, or The Initiative and Referendum Act, at least 12 percent of all the registered voters in the country must sign the petition, and among the number each legislative district must be represented by at least three percent.

Puno, however, also said that the state of the nation is in danger if the means of amending the law of the land are being hindered by the wills and the caprices of the few.

“My simple point is that our democratic republican state stands in imminent danger if all the ways of amending or revising the Constitution to respond to the necessities of time are blockaded by the wills and the caprices of the few,” said Puno added.