Happy to be weird, says Roque

HE is “happy to be weird,” Harry Roque said of the Inquirer news story on “weird candidates” that included him among the list of offbeat contenders for various elective posts in the May 2016 polls.

“I am sorry if you find this weird. I am happy to be weird in this way and I think our country needs more of my brand of weirdness,” the activist lawyer said of the story published on Thursday.

Roque is running for a congressional seat as representative of the party-list group Kabayan, which stands for Kalusugan, Pabahay at Kabuhayan (Health, Housing and Livelihood), a multisectoral organization registered with the Commission on Elections.

Roque, the counsel for the family of slain transgender Jennifer Laude, the families of the victims of the 2009 Maguindanao massacre, and the family of slain broadcast journalist Gerry Ortega, had initially considered running for senator under the United Nationalist Alliance of Vice President Jejomar Binay.

But in August, Roque decided to run under the Kabayan party-list group instead, saying the move was more consistent with his human rights advocacy.

“I have devoted 35 years of my life using the law as a tool for the protection of political and civil rights. But the truth is, though we have gained much by way of jurisprudence, public interest litigation cannot address the root causes of why our political and civil rights are violated. Thirty-five years later, the problems remain the same: poverty, lack of livelihood, lack of housing—all of which lead to  lack of hope,” said the full-time professor of constitutional law at the University of the Philippines. Jerome Aning