The Supreme Court of the Philippines
The Supreme Court of the Philippines is one of the most highly respected institutions in the country.
In the Republic of the Philippines, the Supreme Court is part of the Judicial branch of government, one among the three co-equal branches of government in the Philippines, the other branches being the Executive and the Legislative branches.
The Executive branch is composed of the President, the Vice-President and the Cabinet. The Legislative branch is composed of the Senate (upper house) and Congress (lower house or house or representatives).
The Judicial branch is composed of the Regional Trial Courts, the Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court.
The history of the Supreme Court is generally divided into the Pre-Hispanic and Hispanic periods (1500's), the American period (1900's), and the period when the Philippine gained independence soon after the second world war.
The Supreme Court of the Philippines was officially established on June 11, 1901 through the passage of Act No. 136, otherwise known as the Judiciary Law of the Second Philippine Commission. By virtue of that law, judicial power in the Philippine Islands was vested in the Supreme Court, Courts of First Instance and Justice of the Peace courts. Other courts were subsequently established.
The present Supreme Court of the Philippines is composed of a chief justice and 14 associate justices. All these justices are lawyers who have shown an impressive track record in the legal profession.
The Supreme Court justices are appointed by the President of the republic. Of course, the president has the prerogative of choosing anyone for the position of justice. The president's decisions are sometimes beset with controversies, but generally those who are appointed have extensive legal backgrounds and experience.
There have been various landmark decisions of the Supreme Court of the Philippines and these, we believe, would someday be included in the wealth of jurisprudence in the world of law.
One most important and recent decision of the Supreme Court that resulted in weeks of discussion not just among lawyers but among many Filipinos is the Supreme Court decision penned by associate justice Carpio quashing the move to ammend the Philippine consitution by a people's initiative.
The people's initiative had been a hot issue surrounding the presidency since it involves the proposal to ammend the constitution in order to change the current presidential system of government to a parliamentary form of government. Justice Carpio is an associate justice of the Supreme Court.
To understand this issue, one must realize that Philippine politics is to some extent a politics of personality and dynasty. That is, politicians many times get elected to office because of the personality that they project among the people, or because they belong to a family that had weilded political power for decades.
Naturally, many politicians in power want to stay in power forever. The Philippine constitution, however, restricts the politicians' stay in office for a fixed number of terms, where a term is a fixed number of years.
Since some politicans may want to stay in power forever, some have pushed the people's initiative to ammend the constitution to provide a legal framework for extended (i.e. very long) stay in power.
The only way for the legal framework to support this want for power is to ammend the constitutional provision that limits one's term in office. For some, this means that the presidential system of government must be changed to some form of government that facilitates the stay in power of those who are already in power.
Whether the solution to this is the shift from a presidential form of government to a parliamentary form of government is something for the lawyers and the courts to decide.
The Supreme Court of the Philippine, in the decision penned by Justice Carpio, ruled on disallowing the people's initiative to ammend the consitution.
There have been a lot of issues on this but our space constraints would not allow us to discuss all those issues. Suffice it to say that the decision of the Supreme Court was welcomed by the most prestigious legal circles and experts.
There were, of course, dissenting positions, but the general state of affairs created by that decision flabbergasted a lot of legal circles and experts. In other words, the Supreme Court had simply said that changing the supreme law of the land cannot be changed at will, even if it will involve millions of signatures that support the people's initiative to ammend the constitution.
One important part of the decision reads:
"This Court cannot betray its primordial duty to defend and protect the Constitution. The Constitution, which embodies the people's sovereign will, is the bible of this Court. This Court exists to defend and protect the Constitution. To allow this constitutionally infirm initiative, propelled by deceptively gathered signatures, to alter basic principles in the Constitution is to allow a desecration of the Constitution. To allow such alteration and desecration is to lose this Court's raison d'etre".
The Philippine Supreme Court is indeed not only a vanguard for the defense of democratic principles, but truly an institution that safeguards the very roots that provide support to democracy, in service to the people.
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