Wednesday, October 03, 2007 Malilong: Highhandedness in the Senate probe By Frank Malilong The Other Side
COMELEC Chairman Benjamin Abalos has resigned but continues to profess his innocence. I hope he will pursue his planned suit for damages against businessman Joey de Venecia and former Neda chief Romulo Neri so that the issue of who lied--–and continue to lie---between them can be settled by an impartial arbiter.
I was hoping, too, that he’d include the senators who tormented him during the Senate hearings as defendants in his civil suit. I know that our legislators enjoy immunity when performing their constitutionally mandated duty but that principle should be tested if only to find out how far they can go in abusing a guest in their own house.
Being insulted may be part of the territory insofar as public officials are concerned, the theory being that they can always seek refuge in the temple of a clear conscience. But shouldn’t the right to privacy be held sacred for everyone, regardless of status or office? When a senator confronts you with tsismis about your private life, isn’t he crossing the line?
Our law says that everyone must, in the exercise of his rights or the performance of his duties, act with justice, give everyone his due and observe honesty and good faith. Can justice, honesty and good faith be presumed in an act as revolting as spreading lies about your private life and on nationwide television yet? Or is a senator above the law on human relations?
I don’t like Abalos although I admire him for resigning and, in the process, preserving what is left of the integrity of the Comelec. Until now, I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why de Venecia would lie against him--–and Mike Arroyo. He had much more to lose than gain from accusing the two gentlemen. The young de Venecia may have been a drug user but he is not stupid.
But even if the senators were convinced that Abalos was guilty and were incensed at how he could continue to lie through his teeth in the face of the overwhelming evidence against him, they had no right to treat him the way they did. Or is respect for a fellow human being a lost art among their honors?
Indeed, I am beginning to wonder, as I’m sure many others are, whether the Senate investigations are in fact nothing more than a needless show of how mighty and powerful the office of a senator is. Remember how one of them moved to search for a potential witness, who was reported to have earlier been seen in the Senate premises, and to detain him until further orders of the Senate? How much more highhandedness can we expect from them?
Oh, by the way, did I hear it right that the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines has praised the Senate for its conduct of the investigation on the National Broadband Network deal? I hope it is not true that they said that. If they did, I’d like to see the day when one of them is summoned to the Senate and is asked about the children that he has sired.
The Senate is a powerful institution and much of that power proceeds not from the Constitution but from the integrity and the evenhandedness of the ladies and gentlemen who sat in it. How I long for the glorious days of Recto, Tañada, Padilla, Salonga, Diokno and their kind.
