THE CITIZEN ON MARS

The Batasan 5 (lawmakers Satur Ocampo, Joel Virador, Liza Maza, Rafael Mariano, and Teodoro Casino) —or the circumstances that led to the coining of the now much-mentioned alphanumeric phrase—should be one for the books. If it’d be in the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not catalogue of strange and fantastic occurrences, then it might as well be and it would not be much of a surprised to me. For one, the incident of five well-known legislators being encamped (And in apparent captivity) inside the Batasan Pambansa building for a number of days now is such a highly irregular episode in our political life that I would have expected every sane Filipino—especially so those of strong legal minds—to howl loudly in protest and disgust. A former Supreme Court Justice did just that about a couple of days ago but it is not exactly what I meant by a palpable gripe, a sort of a public outcry. What I must have heard from those who are supposed to complain to every appalling act of the administration were more of whining than protesting. Don’t you think that most of the opposition now have already been cowed and bullied effectively by the strings of high-profile arrests made by the authorities and shutting down of media outfits? Have they lost their fire? It looked that way to me for how come the Batasan 5 incident persist unto this time and nobody seems to be complaining loudly except the hapless legislators themselves now cuddling in temporary beds (and temporary lives), with their faces tinged and harassed by tremendous fear or worry? Nobody seems to appear on the stage of public debate and become the Mark Anthony to these five Caesars, harking “Friends, Romans and countrymen. What fault have these five brethrens of mine have committed that they are now denied of decent sleep?”

What we got here is fear creeping into the very veins of the people that even an extremely scandalous circumstance like the five legislators now hiding from lawmen inside the very building where laws are supposed to be made becomes just an ordinary item in the evening news. This mirthful situation could only happen in the Philippines, as the famous banter goes. When did actually the last time the House of Congress offered “protective custody” when in fact there should be no such silly thing as it would redound to resistance of arrest and blocking the ends of justice. No such silly thing is actually allowed or entertained in our legal or political system except by the Department of Social Welfare and Development for women and children victimized by violence, abuse and oppression (I could be wrong ’bout this since I haven’t opened my law books for a long, long time now. Just in case, I hope some adept legal minds out there could explain more on the nature of protective custody.). We have habeas corpus or recognizance, but “protective custody” by Congress is so strange that I suspect that it is a convenient mode that we all need to invent so that each of us could still maintain an amount of self-respect while the government is infringing on our civil liberties left and right. It’s like declaring to the government, “Alright, go ahead and set aside every rights and privileges the constitution affords us but do it while I am taking my lunch, or asleep in the backyard, or just about anytime I am not looking”. “Protective custody” had to be invented in order that every self-respecting politician in this country that still has an ounce of self-esteem left in them (like Speaker Joe de Venecia) could pretend that the Arroyo Administration is not really holding down every oppositionists by a pseudo-military rule and that nobody is being threatened and nobody is being a coward here. Right now, we are akin to what happened to the entire German population while Adolf Hitler was massacring millions of Jews; they all kept a blind eye and in effect gave a silent approval to an unspeakable evil. We seem to be now like a nation who keeps silent as a blindly loyal wife to a ruinous husband. Sometimes, this sort of thing is called mass hypnosis—a social malady where the entire population had developed a seeming numbness to every malice the government finds its fingers on.

We’ve have seen how the police authorities were trying to arrest the Batasan 5 legislators without the benefit of a warrant of arrest, on the pretext that the said legislators had virtually committed a crime in the open (Rebellion is said to be a continuing crime where even after the initial act or acts of rebellion were committed, the suspect continues to commit the crime all the time after that and wherever he or she may be situated) and even without emergency rule, they could be arrested without any judicial sanction. But strangely, what happens next is that the police had failed to enforce the supposedly proper warrantless arrest fully because the concerned legislators were on a “protective custody” by the House of Congress, after the House Speaker immediately declared the five lawmakers to be under its auspices for the meantime. And mind you, the police amiably abided amiably to this “protective custody” edict of the House like a warm dog—in fact like a ravaging german shepherd that got cowed by a sniff of a hefty bone. I mean, what we got here is apparently a case of moro-moro when the police should have entered the premises of the Batasan Pambansa building to effect the arrest, if in fact the Batasan 5 legislators truly had committed a crime. In law, the arresting officer is allowed to break-in and breakout into and from any enclosure or building in order that the arrest of a criminal or suspected criminal may be effected fully. The fact that the police recoiled in the last minute had shown that the authorities were not really serious about their charges and that they do not fully believe that the five legislators to be arrested really had committed a crime. This patent hesitation may be attacked later on as a technical ground for dismissal of the criminal action to be leveled against the concerned legislators, asserting among others that in fact, the subjects weren’t actually committing a continuing crime all the time they were encamped in the congressional building for if they were, the police should have arrested them immediately. Otherwise, any police officer having known of the location where the Batasan 5 is “hiding” should be dismissed from duty for allowing a supposedly continuing crime to go on without any arrest made. And that would mean, all of the members and officials of the Philippine National Police. And because of Proclamation 1017 (where the armed forces was ordered to maintain public peace and order), that would also include all members and officers of the Armed Forces of The Philippines. We could be seeing thousands immediately out-of-work. The good thing that may come out from that mass dismissal would be thousands of young men and women finding themselves suddenly recruited and then suddenly employed.

Because of the circumstances stated in the preceding paragraph, I believe that there was really no continuing crime committed by the Batasan 5 legislators. According to Malacañang’s chief legal mind, the known constitutionalist and former congressman Antonio Nachura, a warrantless arrest for a continuing crime like rebellion may be effected only if inquest had already been made. But what we got we got is the police trying to arrest known legislators of this land without the benefit of a warrant of arrest based merely on the testimony of a lone witness, which at this time is nothing more than pure hearsay. In this country, one can be held for rebellion by just attending meetings or a Tupperware party. I think this country had gone to the dogs for a while there. We’d be fully gone to the dogs in the near future if this government should be allowed to continue infringing even the most basic of civil liberties.

I mean, when is enough is enough?