Public interest lawyer writes for Inquirer

“FLEA Market of Ideas” opens today in the Opinion section and will run every Monday thereafter.

Expect Joel Ruiz Butuyan to discuss political, economic, social and foreign concerns, as well as art, scuba diving, history, mountain climbing, antique maps and coins, books, places, people and any other issue that “needs a bath of a little sunshine.”

Butuyan, a product of the University of the Philippines and College of William and Mary in Virginia in the United States, has much to draw from. He briefly practiced law in Virginia and the Metro Washington area before returning to the motherland to resume his practice. His fields are criminal, civil and commercial litigation, international business law, corporate law, election law and labor law. He remains a member of the American Bar Association.

He is the managing partner of Roque and Butuyan Law Offices, a small firm that has been described by an American lawyer as “the most troublesome small law firm in the Philippines.”

BUTUYAN CONTRIBUTED PHOTO

Butuyan is also among public interest lawyers—under the Center for International Law (Centerlaw), of which he is the president—who seek to promote human rights in general and freedom of expression in particular in Southeast Asia.

He has spoken at freedom of expression conferences and workshops in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Belgium and the Netherlands. He was sent by an international lawyers group of free expression advocates as trial observer in the criminal case of Vietnam’s most famous blogger, Dieu Cay.

Pemberton case

Centerlaw has provided legal assistance to persecuted and jailed journalists and bloggers in Thailand and Singapore. In the Philippines, it is involved in public interest cases and represents the families of 15 of the victims of the Ampatuan massacre and the family of Jeffrey “Jennifer” Laude in the Pemberton murder case. It represented the comfort women in the “Malaya Lolas” case in the Supreme Court.

Apart from all that, Butuyan has transformed his family’s ancestral house in the province of Isabela into a museum featuring more than 100 contemporary artworks, antique maps and coins, and tribal artifacts.

“I put up the museum with the intent of offering an alternative destination for school children in the Cagayan Valley after I learned that [they have only] military camps for their field trips,” he says.

“[I call] the museum my own ‘Field of Dreams’ project because it is located in my small town that is surrounded by a sea of rice fields in faraway Isabela, and because it figuratively targets as audience ordinary people who have had no exposure to a museum of art.”

Butuyan says Typhoon “Lando” (international name: Koppu) felled trees on the property and caused damage to the museum, but it still stands and will continue to be available to public school children in the region.