Flimsy excuse, useless spin

Opposition senators have for the third time, asked for a reset from the Supreme Court (SC) for a new schedule of oral arguments on the petition challenging the Philippines’ withdrawal of its membership from the International Criminal Court (ICC).

This request for the reset comes after the SC junked the petition for detained Sen. Leila de Lima’s motion to be allowed to attend and represent herself at the oral arguments.

De Lima, Senators Francis Pangilinan, Franklin Drilon, Bam Aquino, Risa Hontiveros and Antonio Trillanes used as their excuse their lack of a representative “whom they deem able to fully articulate their position” before the SC. And De Lima is able to fully articulate this? Give me a break!

In ruling on the petitioners’ plea to allow De Lima to appear personally and argue the ICC withdrawal, but which plea the SC found “no compelling reason” to have De Lima — who is detained on drug-related charges — to personally appear for the orals, explaining further that the detained senator never “pleaded circumstances or competencies exclusive to her which make her appearance, to the exclusion of her co-petitioners, imperative and indispensable.”

In truth, these opposition senators, especially De Lima, are not being truthful in their petition to have their female colleague argue their petition, because it is much too evident that they were using this excuse for the SC to provide her with temporary freedom.

De Lima may be a lawyer to this day — until of course, she is disbarred, if she ever gets disbarred, for ignoring the SC’s resolution granting Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo permission to leave the country for medical reasons as well as De Lima’s deliberate usurpation of the powers of the court to ban Arroyo from leaving the country, despite the fact that there was no case filed against her at the time of the order to have Arroyo banned — but despite her being a lawyer and a senator, De Lima’s expertise was never international law or even constitutional law (if she knew her constitutional law, she must have known that her order to ban Arroyo was unconstitutional as she has no mandate to order hold orders on her own), since her supposed field chosen was, prior to her having become the justice chief under her patron, the yellow president, an election lawyer.

What reason then, other than trying to get a “legal furlough” by getting the SC to approve of her being the lawyer to not only represent herself in the petition but to also argue the case of the ICC withdrawal being unconstitutional?

Such an opportunity it would be for her, to be able to leave her cell and blast away at President Duterte and condemn him for trying to get off easy for his alleged murder of suspected drug pushers and addicts.

Naming her as the counsel to argue the case against the ICC withdrawal was a no go. The SC justices are not dumb. They are au courant in what is going on and can smell a political trick half a mile away. How they rule on issues is another matter.

The senators and the Philippine Coalition for the ICC are challenging Duterte’s move to withdraw the Philippine membership from the Rome Statute, the establishing treaty of the ICC, without the concurrence of two-third of the Senate, which this chamber had ratified in 2011.

The Philippines announced last March it would be withdrawing from the ICC. The announcement came a month after the international tribunal’s prosecutor opened a preliminary examination into the alleged crimes against humanity of President Duterte.

The ICC special prosecutor’s announced examination was clearly not an investigation into the alleged crimes against humanity but the political opposition and the yellow media created the spin that this examination was an investigation on Duterte and that the special prosecutor move against Duterte was based of the filed complaint from Trillanes and the Magdalos’ lawyer Jude Sabio, which was a gigantic lie, since examination by the ICC prosecutor does not act on complaints for examination purposes.

This spin was being used by the same members of the political opposition, both the House and the Senate to portray Duterte as afraid of being made accountable before the ICC for the alleged extra-judicial killings, which numbers his critics have ballooned to 12,000, which is bereft of fact and evidence.

They don’t get it. The members of political opposition can wail all they want but they won’t get it either way, as the Philippines after March 2019 is out of the ICC permanently.

What then is there for the Senate to concur if at all?