Retired SC justice Carpio resumes column in Inquirer

MANILA, Philippines — Recently retired Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio — “the best Chief Justice the country never had” — returns to writing for the Inquirer on Thursday as he resumes his weekly column “Crosscurrents.”

Carpio, who has made it his personal advocacy to protect and preserve Philippine territorial and maritime sovereignty, specifically in the West Philippine Sea (WPS), said he would be writing mostly about defending Philippine territory and maritime zones, and legal problems that affect national issues and good governance.

Carpio first started Crosscurrents on April 22, 2001, when he returned to private law practice after serving as chief legal counsel to then President Fidel V. Ramos. His last column was on Oct. 21, 2001, shortly before he took his oath as a member of the Supreme Court.

He retired last October when he turned 70 after a distinguished 18-year career in the judiciary, writing 935 full-blown decisions, 79 dissenting opinions, 30 concurring opinions, 13 separate opinions and four concurring and dissenting opinions.

No case backlog

He left the court with no backlog, or unresolved case. This paper noted that that was “a virtual miracle in the Philippine judicial system, which is notorious for cases left hanging for years, decades even, so that complainants grow old and die without seeing the dawn, as it were, and injustice lies unresolved and festering.”

“At 70, I plan to spend most of my remaining waking hours defending our sovereign rights in the WPS through the means I know best — through the rule of law, the great equalizer in disputes between a militarily weak country and a nuclear-armed regional superpower,” he said at a testimonial held in his honor last October.

The former justice has been widely hailed as a true statesman and exemplary patriot; the Supreme Court — where “in the latter years [he was] constantly within a hair’s breadth of the top post but, by virtue of circumstances and factors including his own profound sense of propriety, ever distant from it,” said the Inquirer editorial — bade him goodbye with a plaque of recognition that described him as “a solid anchor, a firm impenetrable rock, and an immovable tower of strength that holds the Court together when it truly mattered.”

Or, as fellow Inquirer columnist Solita Collas-Monsod put it, he is the “last man standing” for his brilliance, independence and principles — virtues that would no doubt continue to inform his columns, commentaries and insights for the Inquirer and for the rest of the country. “Justice Carpio has class. He is a class act.”