Palace: Gov’t can require health workers to stay

MANILA, Philippines — It would be “perfectly legal” for the government to require health workers to stay in the country amid the new coronavirus pandemic, presidential spokesperson Harry Roque said on Wednesday.

Roque said President Rodrigo Duterte’s proposal to prevent health workers from going abroad was in keeping with the general welfare clause of the Constitution.

“It is an exercise of police power because the primary basis for the President’s concern is these people are going to the most dangerous places as far as COVID-19 is concerned,” Roque said over the ABS-CBN News Channel.

He noted that some of the country’s health workers were bound for the United States, Italy and Spain, which have the highest number of COVID-19 cases.“If we are restricting travel to these places, why are we allowing them now to work in these places?” he said.

Duterte earlier asked the Department of Justice to look into whether it would be legal to keep the health workers in the country despite their work contracts abroad.

Roque said the issue of the country’s own need for medical workers was another matter.“We’re looking at that particular reasoning as a valid exercise of police powers,” he said.

The Philippine Overseas Employment Administration earlier suspended temporarily the deployment of Filipino health-care workers abroad to “prioritize human resource allocation for the national health-care system at the time of the national state of emergency.”

The move drew swift condemnation, resulting in the ban being lifted for nurses and other health-care workers with existing contracts. But those who were supposed to leave for new work contracts abroad were barred from flying out of the country.