(Following is the Welcome Address delivered by Fr. Dionisio M. Miranda, SVD, STD, University President, during the Conference on Strengthening Governance Through Responsive Citizenship and Innovative Jurisprudence, held at the Albert van Gansewinkel Hall, Law and Graduate Business Building, on Tuesday, 4 August 2009. The conference was co-sponsored by the Michigan State University School of Criminal Justice, Xavier University at Cagayan de Oro City and the University of San Carlos.)
Honourable guests from the School of Criminal Justice and allied academic units of the Michigan State University, organizers from Xavier University – Ateneo de Cagayan, faculty and students of the University of San Carlos, friends from other schools named earlier, representatives from various government institutions, LGUs, NGOs, clergy and media, everyone interested in good governance – Good Morning.
Last week Father Joaquin Bernas, SJ, came to town to hold a conference for C-CIMPEL on Con-Ass. In one of the several attempts to revise the constitutions, he explained, the members of the convention, assuming that the transition to a unicameral legislature was a done deal, failed to provide for the possibility that a bicameral legislature would still be preferred, as in fact is was, by the slimmest margin of one vote. That article provided that any amendment should be decided by a two-thirds vote of Congress. In a unicameral congress the two-thirds was straightforward; in a bicameral Congress the two-thirds became problematic. Was this two-thirds of both houses to be achieved by voting together or separately? In sum the attempt to effect charter change at all costs stumbles on an insoluble obstacle, one left unresolved by a previous constituent assembly through the most embarrassing of reasons: sheer oversight.
Because Congress was stymied, could the judiciary not take cognizance of the problem and offer advice? No, according to the jurists, at least on technical grounds: it is not the function of the judiciary to offer advice on hypothetical issues; its only task is to adjudicate actual controversy, legally defined. For as long as Congress was only threatening to, but had not actually taken any particular action, there was no extant case for the court to hear pre-emptively.
What then? In the open forum I inquired whether the people, through the mechanism of popular recall, could not constitute itself as a party in interest and therewith make representation with the court to rule on what appeared to it as a de facto controversy, only to be given the same response: “No way.” A true impasse indeed.
Tomorrow we will bury Cory Aquino, acknowledged icon of democracy or, alternatively, saint of people power. But the process of changing the dictatorship through people power provoked an intriguing debate that revisited conundrums similar to those of tyrannicide: may one, in the name of the rule of law, violate the same rule so law could prevail? If there is any challenge on which jurisprudence stumbles on inevitably, it is the conflict between the letter of the law and its spirit, or between positive law and natural law in ethics, or between natural law and divine law in moral theology.
Pick any newspaper today and you will find current issues of governance. For example, the Palace’s refusal of the Judicial Bar Council’s list of nominees to fill the vacancies at the Supreme Court, or the dismissal by the Sandiganbayan of the graft cases filed against organizers of the 12th ASEAN Summit in 2007, more popularly known as the lamppost scandal. The former portends a constitutional crisis, the latter invites to outrage and indignation. How can responsive citizenship and innovative jurisprudence assist us here?
In posing rather complex problems to you, I may have rendered myself a poor host by Filipino standards, according to which ideal hospitality requires that we offer our guests every possible effort to make all of them feel at ease and at home. On the other hand I was made to understand that you all came to the university from far and near with only one purpose today: to wrestle with the challenging issues of governance, not from the initiative of state leadership, but through the responses of people who often do not realize the power they wield, and therefore requiring innovative jurisprudence from the experts. If I read academic etiquette correctly this demands that you be served perplexity as appetizers at first bite. That you find plenty to stimulate your legal intelligence is the spirit of the welcome that I offer you to our conference today. Ladies and gentlemen, it is our fervent wish that you enjoy the conference day at the University of San Carlos and find it fruitful. Welcome one and all.
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