Mercado: Mummified precedent

WHAT happens when dictators are booted out?

After Ferdinand Marcos fled, rebels blew up his bust carved into an Ilocos hillside. In Paraguay, people shattered Gen. Alfredo Strossner’s statute. Saddam Hussein’s statue in Iraq followed. Partisans hanged the corpse of Mussolini on a clothesline.

“The evil that men do lives after them,” Shakepeapeare said in the 1599 play “Julius Caesar.” And in 2010, the Court of Appeals here made sure it does.

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Justice Portia Aliño-Hormachuelos and two associates exhumed a legal mummy from the ousted dictatorship: “Ilagan vs. Enrile.” Once a detainee is charged, he may no longer question his detention through a writ of habeas corpus, it states.

Violations committed by the military were “cured” by this mummified precedent. That kept the “Morong 43” health workers imprisoned, despite infractions of their civil liberties.

What were those “healed” violations?

The search warrant named the wrong person. The 43 were denied counsel. Thus, the inquest proceedings were invalid. So was the information filed.

The “cure” proved worse than the illness.

“(T)he use of force cannot make wrongs into right,” Justice Normandie Pizarro dissented. “An illegal search and seizure, as well as an irregular inquest, cannot ripen into a valid… ‘remedial’ or ‘curative’ information.

“We must free ourselves from the shackles of ‘curative information,’” Justice Francisco Acosta wrote…” (That’d) make every habeas corpus proceeding an exercise in futility, similar to salt that had lost its taste.”

“The court desert(ed) its duty as guardian of civil liberties,” both concluded.” Sadly, this will not be the first betrayal.

Benigno Aquino planned to speak of a servile Supreme Court that cloned the dictatorship. An assassin’s bullet silenced him.

“It is most ironic, after martial law has allegedly been lifted, that the Supreme Court last April ruled it can no longer entertain petitions for habeas corpus for persons detained under a Presidential Commitment Order,” Ninoy planned to say.

“(This) covers all so-called national security cases. And under present circumstances (that) can cover almost anything.”

A Supreme Court challenge will be mounted against the farce of “remedial information.” This is welcome. Otherwise, lower courts-–and the military-–will see the Court of Appeals decision as a wink for more-of-the-same.

The President used the military to prop up her unpopular regime. In exchange, she tolerated impunity for crimes by some military men.

Striking down the martial law “curative information” doctrine should be matched by the military dismissing criticism as “communist propaganda.”

Here is what the 2009 US State Department annual report says of human rights in the Philippines: “Arbitrary, unlawful, and extrajudicial killings by elements of the security services and political killings, including killings of journalists, continued to be major problems….

Concerns about impunity persisted. Members of the security services committed acts of physical and psychological abuse on suspects and detainees, and there were instances of torture….

Disappearances occurred, and arbitrary or warrantless arrests and detentions were common… Corruption was endemic... Leftist and human rights activists often were subject to harassment by local security forces.”

Would our Court of Appeals have embraced “curative information” with ardor if they took note of this context?