Senator Grace Poe CONTRIBUTED PHOTO BY JOSEPH VIDAL/ PRIB
A THIRD petition to take Sen. Grace Poe out of the 2016 presidential election was filed in the Commission on Elections (Comelec) Tuesday by a political analyst, who said he wanted to show Poe that not all those who were questioning her qualifications were paid by her rivals or people with “evil plots.”
In his 14-page petition, Antonio Contreras, a political science professor at De La Salle University, asked the Comelec to cancel the certificate of candidacy (COC) for President that Poe filed on Oct. 15.
Unlike the first two petitions brought by former Department of Justice Prosecutor Estrella Elamparo on Oct. 16 and by former Sen. Francisco Tatad on Monday, Contreras’ petition does not tackle the question of Poe’s citizenship, but only her supposed failure to meet the 10-year residency required of presidential candidates.
Comelec Chair Andres Bautista on Tuesday announced that Elamparo’s petition had been raffled off to the Second Division.
“The agreement [during the full-commission meeting] is that since the first case has been raffled off to the Second Division, all the other petitions for [Poe’s] disqualification will be consolidated,” Bautista told a news conference.
In an interview with reporters, Contreras said he had no plan to bring a case against Poe, as two similar cases had already been filed against the senator.
But a statement from Poe’s camp on Monday that the cases were the handiwork of “sinister minds” provoked him, he said.
“I realized that it’s about time that we have to tell these people that an ordinary citizen like me, a voter, a natural-born citizen of this Republic, doesn’t have to be sponsored to seek the truth,” Contreras said.
Contreras said he paid the P10,100 filing fee out of his own pocket. He also said De La Salle had nothing to do with his actions against Poe.
“It’s just infuriating to be branded as someone who has an evil plot or has been paid just because you are questioning the qualifications of a candidate,” he said.
Contreras explained that he did not include the issue on Poe’s citizenship as it was already being tackled at the Senate Electoral Tribunal (SET) and there was no clear jurisprudence on the citizenship of a foundling.
“She was a foundling and she was abandoned as a child. For me personally, I also don’t want to be the instrument in her being rendered stateless. That is too cruel to me for it to be applied to a person who was abandoned as a child,” he said.
Proving Poe did not meet the 10-year residency would be easier because “it’s mathematical and numerical,” he said. “There is no judgment about you as a person.”
Poe, an adopted daughter of the late movie actor Fernando Poe Jr. and his wife, actress Susan Roces, was born and raised in the Philippines but moved to the United States in 1991 to finish her undergraduate studies and eventually worked there.
According to her, she decided to return to the Philippines after her father died in December 2004, but returned to the United States in February 2005.
She says she returned to the Philippines the same year and bought a house in Quezon City and enrolled her children in local schools.
In 2006, she says she acquired dual citizenship, although those seeking her disqualification claim that she continued to use her US passport up to 2009.
Later that year, Poe says, she finally got a Philippine passport and the next year she renounced her US citizenship so she could accept her appointment as chair of the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board.
She says she reaffirmed her renunciation of US citizenship in 2011.
Poe’s camp says she returned to live permanently in the Philippines 11 years ago, in late 2004, after the death of her father.
The Comelec’s online precinct finder lists Poe as having registered as a voter on Aug. 31, 2006, at Santa Lucia Elementary School in San Juan City.
In his petition, Contreras asked the Comelec to deny due course to or cancel Poe’s COC on the grounds that she made a false entry in the document when she claimed that she would be a legal resident of the Philippines for 10 years and
11 months by May 9, 2016.
His petition noted that the SET proceedings had established that she reacquired her Filipino citizenship on July 19, 2006.
“While indeed she traveled to the Philippines in 2004 to attend the wake and burial of her adoptive father and on several occasions before that, and while she may have been physically living in the Philippines for a longer duration after that from 2005 as she implies in her [COC], it was as a foreign visitor,” he said.
He said that during that period, Poe was carrying a US passport and she lost her Filipino citizenship on Oct. 18, 2001.
Poe, he said, was also not issued an immigrant certificate of residence by the Bureau of Immigration during this time, which could have proven that her stay in the country was as a permanent resident on an immigrant status.
Contreras said the earliest Poe could claim to have reestablished her Philippine domicile was on July 18, 2006, the date she became a Filipino citizen again by virtue of Republic Act No. 9225.
“This is already too late for her to qualify to run for President in the elections on May 9, 2016, considering that it is already two months and nine days after May 9, 2006, the date which she should meet in order for her to fulfill the 10-year requirement,” he said.
Valenzuela Mayor Rex Gatchalian, Poe’s spokesperson, said the growing number of petitions to disqualify the senator from the presidential race was “aimed at sowing confusion.”
“It’s turning the electoral process into a mockery because why [can’t they just] wait for the [first] one to be decided?” Gatchalian said.
He said “all these petitions are meant to condition the minds of the voters that Senator Poe will be disqualified.”
Gatchalian said, however, that Poe remains undaunted and ready to face the challenges to her qualifications.
Good timing
But two legal experts said the filing of the petitions was good, as the questions about Poe’s citizenship and residency needed to be settled once and for all.
Lawyer Raymond Fortun and former University of the East law dean Amado Valdez agreed with Elamparo and Tatad that Poe was not qualified for the presidency because she was not a natural-born Filipino and had not yet met the 10-year residency required by the Constitution.
They both noted the supposed inconsistencies in the residency periods that Poe indicated in her certificates of candidacy for the 2013 and 2016 elections.
When she filed her COC for senator in October 2012, Poe stated she had been a Philippine resident for the last six years and six months.
When she filed her COC for President last week, however, Poe stated her residency period as being 10 years and 11 months—and not 9 years and six months, which is what you get when you add three years to six years, six months from her 2012 COC, Fortun said.
“They can’t be both correct, right?” Fortun told reporters in an interview.
“She has created the scenario of ‘doubt,’ and she now has to prove through evidence as to what is her ‘reckoning point’ in fixing the date when she reacquired residency,” he added.
Asked when one must start counting Poe’s residency, Fortun replied: “If it were [up to] me, the ‘reckoning point’ was when she told herself ‘I want to establish my residence in the Philippines.’ But subsequent acts may nullify that declaration for the simple reason that the subsequent act is not consistent with someone intending to return to the country.”
Fortun was referring to Poe’s supposed use of her US passport up to 2009. He said even if Poe became a dual citizen in 2006 and renewed her allegiance to the Philippines, her subsequent actions defeated that declaration.
“To illustrate: I can declare my allegiance to the Philippines by tearing my green card in front of the US Embassy. Yet, I continue to use an American passport and pay my taxes in the US, while refusing to even get a Philippine [residence certificate],” Fortun said.
“In such a situation, the verbal declaration does not jive with subsequent acts that reflect a continual use of the benefits of being a US citizen,” he added.
Valdez, chair emeritus of the Philippine Association of Law Schools, agreed with Fortun that even if Poe did reacquire her citizenship or returned to the Philippines in 2005 or 2006, her use of her US passport “negated” her reacquisition of Filipino citizenship.
“The 10-year period of residency must be counted from the time she reacquired her Filipino citizenship. It is only then that she is considered domiciled in the Philippines,” Valdez said.
“If her reacquisition of Filipino citizenship is negated by acts purporting that she is still considering herself an American citizen by using her American passport, then her stay in the Philippines will not be counted to comply with residency requirement,” he added.
For Valdez, Poe’s residency should begin in 2010, when she renounced her US citizenship.
“Her renunciation must be unequivocal. She cannot say one thing and do another. She cannot fit her feet into shoes not her size,” he said.
Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago, who is also running for President, said the Constitution’s requirement for presidential candidates and candidates for Vice President should be strictly interpreted.
Santiago said that for her, the most important question concerning Poe was her citizenship.
The Constitution, Santiago said, requires presidential candidates to be natural-born Filipinos.
“If there is any doubt, the doubt must be resolved against the candidate because it’s found in the Constitution. Any provision of the Constitution must be interpreted strictly because it’s the Constitution. It’s not an ordinary piece of legislation,” she said.
Santiago added that she agreed with Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonio Carpio that all doubts must be resolved in favor of the state.
And proving that someone is a natural-born citizen is no easy thing, she said, “unless you have the mother and the father testifying here.”