Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman (INQUIRER.net PHOTO)
Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman, a member of the minority bloc, on Wednesday said President Rodrigo Duterte’s State of the Nation Address (Sona) lacked focus and was full of adlibs and sound bites.
In a privilege speech during the session, Lagman also took the opportunity to criticize Duterte’s legislative agenda of restoring death penalty, lowering criminal age of liability from 15 years old to nine, as well as changing the system of government from unitary to federal.
“The State of the Nation Address is a concrete articulation of a President’s assessment of the nation’s status, as well as his policy statements and proposed legislation … It is for these reasons that the Sona is documented in a well-prepared speech read by the President, ideally devoid of motherhood statements and with a minimum of adlibs and populist sound bites,” Lagman said.
Lagman made the comment about the Sona of Duterte, who had rambled into side comments and stories that interrupted the delivery of his prepared speech.
“It is unfortunate that President Duterte meandered from his prepared speech into spontaneous and repetitive references on varied subjects and details, losing necessary focus,” Lagman said.
He said because Duterte lost focus in his Sona, “the President must have missed reading important points in his prepared address.”
Lagman then took his time to put out contrary points on Duterte’s legislative agenda set out by Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez.
READ: Alvarez urges Congress to get to work, bares legislative agenda
Lagman said the restoration of death penalty by lethal injection was a “retrogression” from Congress efforts during the administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to lift death penalty.
He countered that studies showed that death penalty was not an effective deterrent to crime as shown by the experience of other countries.
“The death penalty, in varying forms of execution for various crimes, has been imposed since the dawn of civilization but the commission of crimes, including heinous offenses, has persisted, mocking the death penalty,” Lagman said.
He added that the death penalty was “antipoor” because suspected marginalized criminals could not afford the expensive legal fees to ensure their acquittal.
READ: First bill in Congress seeks reinstatement of death penalty
Lagman said at the time Congress abolished death penalty, at least 73.1 percent of inmates on death row belonged to the lowest income classes while only seven convicts were from upper socio-economic class.
He said rehabilitation, not retribution, is the “thrust of modern penology.”
“Only God can forfeit life. No human authority has the power to kill, even if judicially mandated as a recompense for another lost life. The death penalty exacerbates the culture of violence and emboldens the monster in man,” Lagman said.
Meanwhile, Lagman said the proposal to lower the criminal age of liability from 15 years old to nine disregarded the need to determine the age of discernment of youth offenders.
READ: Alvarez files bill lowering age of criminal liability
He said while minors were being used by syndicates to evade liability in crimes, it was the parents who should be held culpable.
“Criminal responsibility is a grave burden which is generally limited to adult offenders and those above 18 years old. Since children lack adequate discretion and discernment, they must not be saddled with criminal culpability at a tender age of nine,” Lagman said.
“It is a gross antichild measure to impose criminal liability on children starting at a tender age of nine years,” he added.
Lagman said there were only four countries which pegged the criminal age of liability at nine years old: Oman, Belize, Iran (for girls), and Ethiopia.
Meanwhile, the Philippines is a signatory of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child, which states that countries should undertake the “establishment of a minimum age below which children shall be presumed not to have the capacity to infringe the penal law.”
“Lowering the age of culpability to nine years old is a patent backsliding which is inconsistent with our treaty obligations,” Lagman said.
Lastly, Lagman said Congress should not venture into amending the 1987 Constitution to make the government federal without a study on the pros and cons of veering away from unitary.
READ: Alvarez files federalism bill on first day of Duterte presidency
“We must not be galvanized into frenzied approbation of the proposed federal system, which is principally based on motherhood statements of superior efficacy and unvalidated benefits,” Lagman said.
He warned that a federal form of government would heighten regional tensions among ehtnolinguistic groups, worsen imbalance in regional development, and create overlap in responsibilities of state governments.
He also said a federal form of government would “balloon” the bureaucracy because of the increase in number of bureaucrats in government, and make political families more entrenched in the political system by giving them more powers.
Lagman said even the separatist groups in Mindanao may not be satisfied with a federal system.
“Change to federalism is costly. It would entail billions of pesos to set up state governments and ensure the delivery of state services,” Lagman said.
Lagman also reacted to Duterte’s statement that human rights should not be a shield by criminals and drug pushers.
READ: Duterte: Don’t use human rights as excuse to destroy PH
Lagman said human rights were never a shield, but a “potent guidepost” to ensure rule of law, which should respect even the rights of suspected criminals.
Lagman made the statement amid a spate of summary killings of suspected criminals and drug pushers amid Duterte’s war on terror.
READ: Look into extrajudicial killings under Duterte, Congress pressed
“The universality of human rights prescribes that law enforcers respect and protect the human and constitutional rights, more particularly the absolute right to life, of suspected criminal offenders,” Lagman said.
Lagman echoed the words of the late senator and human rights advocate Jose Diokno, who said: “No cause is more worthy than the cause of human rights … they are what makes a man human. Deny them and you deny man’s humanity.”
“Let us all defend Art. II, Sec. 11 of the Constitution that mandates the state to value ‘the dignity of every human person’ and guarantee ‘full respect for human rights’—an injunction that President Duterte and all of us are sworn to uphold,” Lagman said.