It’s high time the government “rethink its policy” of purportedly pillorying witnesses during investigations following the suicide of Development Bank of the Philippines (DBP) lawyer Benjamin Pinpin less than six months after the death of former Energy Secretary Angelo Reyes, Sen. Joker Arroyo said on Sunday.
Arroyo said in a telephone interview that there was a connection between Pinpin’s decision to take his own life and Reyes’ suicide earlier this year.
Witnesses in controversial cases now find it better to end their lives than subject themselves and their loved ones to public humiliation after appearing at a public hearing, the senator said.
Reyes, a former chief of staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, shot himself in the heart in front of his mother’s grave in February at the height of the Senate inquiry into the misuse of military funds to line the pockets of officials. He was accused of receiving more than P150 million from a military slush fund.
Pinpin, a mid-level executive of DBP, claimed in a suicide letter on July 27 that he chose to end his life than see his family suffer humiliation for some issues he was forced to admit in an affidavit.
The new DBP management has filed a criminal complaint of graft and violation of banking laws against 25 past and current officers and three private individuals in connection with the grant of P660 million to a firm owned by former Trade Minister Roberto Ongpin in 2009.
“The government must rethink its policy in respect to its obsession with high-profile investigations, that respective respondents, who are not even formally charged (in court), are driven to take their own lives rather than go through an investigation where they are pilloried as guilty even before the start of a formal (court process),” Arroyo said.
“McCarthyism is a thing of the past,” the senator added, referring to the communist witch-hunt in the US congressional hearings of the 1950s.
“It is the duty of the government to ensure the observance of the elementary rudiments of fair play (in investigations), which in plain language is the essence of due process,” Arroyo said.
“A man who takes his own life to expose the coercive methods employed by his superiors to make him make fake accusations is an indictment of government’s cavalier attitude toward human rights,” he added.
Arroyo said the two suicides should be an eye-opener for authorities who enjoy subjecting witnesses to ridicule instead of “giving … respondents the sporting chance to be heard well and fully, and not to be convicted by publicity, by innuendoes and suggestions, by hearsay evidence.”