Last 10 December, I woke up thinking that North Korea had invaded the United States and succeeded in taking over its government. That is because I read in the news that the United States Treasury Department had issued an order declaring Pastor Apollo Quiboloy as a supposed "human rights violator" and "blocking (his) properties" in the United States and prohibiting, within the same jurisdiction, "the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods or services by to or for Quiboloy's benefit."

All that without the benefit of even one minute of trial (Quiboloy's hearings are set for 2024 yet). And the supreme irony of it all is that the actions were done during Human Rights Day. At least we can credit the Treasury Department for its wry sense of humor.

For someone raised as a law student on a steady diet of American constitutional law precepts for four years, the scenario is truly surreal. No person shall be deprived of life, liberty and property without due process of law. A person is presumed innocent unless proven otherwise beyond the shadow of a doubt in a court of law. These provisions in our Bill of Rights are direct transplants from the United States Constitution. And what law student has not heard the catchphrase attributed to the US statesman Daniel Webster that the law must hear before it condemns?

All of the maxims on due process drilled into my head as a student of the law flew out the window that morning of 10 December. It has made me realize how hypocritical the United States government is, or at least its executive branch and some of its elected officials. For here we have a former senator charged with the grave crime of drug trafficking. She is rightly in jail due to warrants obtained after extensive investigations by the Department of Justice and a determination by courts of competent jurisdiction that there is probable cause to detain her without bail. The validity of those warrants has been upheld by our Supreme Court. Yet what do liberal American Senators shout? Free Leila!

Then we have the stupid spectacle of a convicted libeler who has been found by the trial court — and which finding is sustained by the appellate court — to have maligned the reputation of a private businessman by recklessly publishing that he is a murderer, a smuggler and involved in other illegal activities, yet the American press and it officials lionize her, calling the conviction an assault by our government on free expression.

These actuations not only smack of unwelcome meddling; they are downright insulting to our courts and country. These officious foreigners are saying, in effect, that our judges are ignorant and our government does not know what it is doing. That is why these actions should be opposed by every self-respecting Filipino at every turn. The Americans must be reminded that we are no longer a colony.

And they wonder why there is a pivot to other countries like China?

Yet, the same government who calls us — and other countries it wishes to bully and intimidate — out for violating human rights, would heavily impair the rights of Pastor Quiboloy by the stroke of a pen of a few people in Treasury, without giving the Pastor the benefit of hearing his side for even a minute, let alone giving him the proverbial "day in court." Hypocrisy, thy name is Treasury, to paraphrase Shakespeare in Hamlet.

I suppose it was bound to happen in an executive branch led by a man who seems to be sleepwalking through the Presidency. The instinct to shoot before asking questions, to block things without reason, is the essence of lack of wisdom, the workings of naught but blockheads.

(DISCLOSURE: Atty. Ferdinand Topacio is the head of the Philippine legal team of Pastor Apollo Quiboloy of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ.)