With this column, I start a series of articles on the Supreme Court decision which qualified Grace Poe to run for the presidency. The judgment overturned the adverse rulings by the Comelec against Poe. In the 47-page decision penned by Associate Justice Jose Perez, the Supreme Court pronounced the Comelec resolutions, both at the division level and en banc, as “diseased with grave abuse of discretion from roots to fruit”. If affirmed, these Comelec decisions, according to Chief Justice Sereno, would have resulted in the “illegitimate elimination of an electoral choice, a choice who appears to be one of the frontrunners in all the relevant surveys.”
To those still in doubt about what the Supreme Court decided, the exact text of the dispositive section of the majority opinion (law students know this is the most important part of the decision) says it all. It does not only annul the Comelec decisions canceling her Certificate of Candidacy but it specifically and categorically, without qualification, states that Grace Poe is qualified as candidate for president.
One expects that another case will be filed if Poe wins, a quo warranto proceeding this time before the Presidential Electoral Tribunal, also composed by the Chief Justice and all 14 members of the Supreme Court. It does not take rocket science, though, to predict what will happen in that case given the numbers in the majority and minority and the doctrinal pronouncements of the Justices in the current case. If Poe won this case without political backing relying purely on legal and moral argument, her case will even be stronger with the backing of the people who would have elected her president come May 9.
For sure, the Poe decision will be recognized as a classic and iconic decision of the Supreme Court. It is relevant not only for constitutional and election law but also for human rights, family law, the law on evidence, and international law. As a constitutional professor and scholar, reading through the hundreds of pages of the various opinions, I am able to admire the deliberateness that characterized the Supreme Court decision in this case. Indeed, it is comforting to know that you have a Court that debated and considered all angles of this important case. This landmark decision will be praised for its scholarship and practical wisdom, in particular in upholding the rights of foundlings and global Filipinos.
It will be praised for its innovative recourse to statistics, international law, and a compassionate application of the rules of evidence. Through this case, Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno has cemented her intellectual and political leadership of the Court.
The majority opinion was concurred in by eight other justices. Of these eight, five had separate concurring opinions, namely Chief Justice Sereno, and Justices Presbitero Velasco Jr., Marvic Leonen, Francis Jardeleza and Alfredo Benjamin Caguioa. That leaves three who did not file separate concurring opinions. Of these three, Justices Lucas Bersamin and Jose Mendoza signed the majority opinion without qualifications, while Justice Diosdado Peralta joined the separate opinion of Caguioa. Five Justices wrote dissenting opinions—Justice Antonio Carpio, Justice Arturo Brion, Justice Teresita de Castro, Justice Mar del Castillo and Justice Estela Bernabe. Justice Bienvenido Reyes joined Justice Bernabe in her dissent. Even if I do not agree with them, I have observed that the dissents are as well written and as strongly argued as the majority and concurring opinions.
All nine Justices in the majority opinion agree that Senator Poe did not commit any material misrepresentation in her certificate of candidacy. On that basis alone, for Justice Caguioa, the Comelec decisions should be nullified. There is nothing new in this pronouncement. The PET has sole jurisdiction to rule on election disputes related to qualifications. The Comelec can cancel certificates of candidacy if there is an express fraud or misrepresentation, like providing the wrong birth date or residence but not if the issues go to the core qualifications, for example the legal status of the candidate. When Poe filed her CoC, she believed she was Filipino and a resident for 10 years. Her lawyers told her so. A constitutional lawyer and election professor like me would have told her so.
Procedural issues aside, the majority also squarely addressed the issues raised in the petitions, namely, the citizenship and residency of Poe.
In ruling that Poe is a natural-born Filipino citizen, the Court made a factual finding. They based this on Poe having typical Filipino features and was abandoned in Catholic Church in a municipality where the population of the Philippines is overwhelmingly Filipinos such that there would be more than a 99-percent chance that a child born in the province would be a Filipino. This would indicate more than ample probability if not statistical certainty, that her parents are Filipinos. To assume otherwise is to accept the absurd, if not the virtually impossible, as the norm, the Court added.
Parenthetically, according to the Court, the burden of proof was on private respondents to show that Poe is not a Filipino citizen. The private respondents should have shown that both of her parents were aliens. Her admission that she is a foundling did not shift the burden to her because such status did not exclude the possibility that her parents were Filipinos, especially as in this case where there is a high probability, if not certainty, that her parents are Filipinos.
Discussing further, the Court said that as a matter of law, foundlings are, as a class, natural-born citizens. While the 1935 Constitution’s enumeration is silent as to foundlings, there is no restrictive language which would definitely exclude foundlings either. The Court also said that both domestic and international laws grant citizenship to foundlings. Thus, our adoption laws require that the adoptee must be a Filipino in the first place to be adopted. International laws which form part of the laws of our country, such as Universal Declaration of Human Rights and UN Convention on the Rights of the Child also confer citizenship to foundlings.
On the matter of Poe’s residence, the Court also made a factual finding and gave full credence to her assertion that she will have been a resident for 10 years and 11 months on the day before the 2016 elections. The Court cited the voluminous records presented by Poe showing that she reestablished her domicile in the Philippines as early as May 24, 2005 and not November 2006, the date she inadvertently, albeit in good faith, indicated in her CoC as senator. For the majority of the Court, it is the fact of residence, not the statement of the person that determines residence for purposes of compliance with the constitutional requirement of residency for election as President.
The legal fight over Poe’s qualifications is over; she has won that decisively. But the political contest is not done. Whether Poe wins that as well is up to the people. And rightly so.
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