Tuesday, June 17, 2008 Obenieta: Follow the low By Myke U. Obenieta So to speak
NOT only the poor could say there are so many of them God must have loved them a lot. In the Philippines, the sky’s the limit as well for lawyers and lawmakers. Where there’s a legion of them swearing their hearts out in the name of the law, you’d think here’s no place for Lady Justice to wallow in distress.
Think again. Or talk about why an international group of advocates reportedly called on all three branches of government in the Philippines to “be accountable” to its commitment to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
“What is the use of a Bill of Rights in the Constitution if we see people killed without justice and dying because of the food crisis?” So sighs Dr. Aurora Parong, the Philippine director of Amnesty International (AI), referring to unsolved cases of politically motivated killings in the country and extra-judicial executions particularly in Cebu. “The possibility of getting genuine justice remains unsure,” stressed Parong in the face of the 2008 AI report about “incompetence in forensic investigations” and “a lack of lawyers” that jostle the course of justice off the track.
Either that or she’s sore for her failure to summon her sense of humor. Then again, to crackle with glee would be gross and criminal when irony becomes twin to law and order. Especially in a country so enamored with lawyers, where politics pushes the button of those agog with the ambition to be called legislators. We got so many of them steeped in the science of weighing right and wrong, it should have been breezy enough to blow away the odor of disquiet and all things reeking of inequity.
Each year, a new batch of lawyers comes with a flourish of publicity you’d think passing the bar is the pinnacle of human achievement. For a while there, winding up in the league of topnotchers—from whose ranks emerge the empire of the powerful—always takes media mileage as if what they’ve done was no less spectacular than planting the Philippine flag in the moon.
In spite of all that, however, it’s no sweat for many of us to agree to another human rights advocate who decries what she calls “a culture of impunity.” Or the failure to prosecute perpetrators of injustice, explains Leonor Gomez, the Visayas coordinator of the Task Force Detainees of the Philippines. As reported, Gomez describes the country’s law enforcement agencies as “not very diligent” in probing and solving a raft of cases written in blood. It is not only investigation that has been lacking, she says, but “also the will to prosecute.”
If her sentiments sounded no higher than the aerodynamics of agitation and propaganda, there’s no denying how corruption hits rock bottom as some bigwigs in the hierarchy of public trust—many of them with an attorney’s degree, to boot—take the law in their hands and deep into their pockets. Trite but true.
No wonder, the Inquirer columnist Neal Cruz could only wax cynical when he opined: “Now I have an idea why we have so many problems, why there is so much strife. The reason? Lawyers.”
Talk about the tangle of legal authority and impunity, and this much is true: There’s no more apt fusion of an adjective and a noun than, sigh, criminal law.
