The latest theatrics of Vice President Sara Duterte over a Home committee’s contempt orders in opposition to her chief of employees, Zuleika Lopez, for evading questions on her workplace’s doubtful use of confidential funds, has supplied the general public intermittent leisure in latest days. Duterte’s dying threats in opposition to President Marcos, First Girl Liza Araneta-Marcos, and Home Speaker Martin Romualdez have in the meantime pushed the alarm button amongst these officers’ safety element, with the Nationwide Bureau of Investigation serving the VP a subpoena on Tuesday to clarify her illegal utterances.
Past spectacle, nonetheless, such popcorn moments additionally reveal the uncomfortable fact concerning the nation’s justice system, the place solely the poor and disenfranchised are dealt the complete brunt of the legislation. As within the VP’s case, the wealthy, highly effective, and privileged can get away with defying the mandate of Congress and with public avowals of ordering a success on the nation’s prime officers.
Distinction the hand-wringing and generic protestations amongst investigative companies over the VP’s brazen threats, with the 2020 warrantless arrest of a 25-year-old trainer from Zambales, for providing in a publish on X (previously Twitter) a P50-million bounty for anybody who may kill then President Duterte. It was apparently meant as a joke—a nasty joke, admittedly—however one which simply challenges logic, for the way may a mere trainer increase the hundreds of thousands he had provided?
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Good tableau
His arrest prompted Alliance of Involved Lecturers social gathering checklist Rep. France Castro to comment how our legal guidelines seem to have a double commonplace: “When a President makes threats, it’s tremendous, however abnormal of us get arrested.”
Extra lately, the courtroom acquitted former senator Leila de Lima of all of the drug-related costs filed in opposition to her by the earlier administration. It took virtually seven years—after a number of modifications of judges and the recantation of govt witnesses—for De Lima’s case to be resolved, a far cry from the just about three months spent in detention by Juanito Jose Remulla III, the son of the justice secretary, earlier than costs of unlawful drug possession in opposition to him have been dismissed.
Earlier than her acquittal, De Lima’s police escorts have been additionally proven bodily blocking media entry to her. Distinction that with the VP requesting a digital camera throughout her hospital go to to Lopez, which police chief Brig. Gen. Nicolas Torre III readily granted. Thus was the general public handled to a Ok-drama scene of a hysterically sobbing Lopez clinging to Duterte, the proper tableau to doc their “victimhood.”
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Birthday bash
In 2023, one other trainer was arrested for posting a video of the site visitors congestion allegedly attributable to the VP’s convoy passing by way of Commonwealth Avenue in Quezon Metropolis. Whereas the VP rapidly denied being within the alleged convoy, a mere trace of her fallibility by a watchful public was sufficient, it appears, to grease the squeaky wheels of selective justice.
Those that cite De Lima’s lengthy overdue exoneration as proof of how the nation’s justice system is totally purposeful typically neglect that equal software of the legislation is an indispensable a part of that system, and one routinely ignored by authorities. Abusive law enforcement officials and authorities actors are the primary to flout the legislation—and obscenely so in the course of the pandemic when recourse to correct authorities was all however unimaginable beneath a lockdown.
Keep in mind the 2020 birthday bash of then NCR police chief Maj. Gen. Debold Sinas that confirmed legislation enforcers violating the well being protocols they have been alleged to implement? Defying the masks mandate and social distancing have been clear violations of the Bayanihan Act, however no sanctions have been meted out to the police. In the meantime, the police arrested six volunteers ferrying reduction items to Bulacan with no legitimate quarantine cross. As of Sept. 6, 2020, a information report stated {that a} complete of 100,486 have been arrested for alleged quarantine violations throughout the nation.
Pork barrel rip-off
The Supreme Courtroom’s grant of bail in 2015 to former senator Juan Ponce Enrile for his plunder case within the pork barrel rip-off for “humanitarian causes,” and former police chief Oscar Albayalde citing “outdated age and well being” as consideration when organizing the potential arrest of former first girl Imelda Marcos are clear manifestations of cockeyed justice as nicely. Whereas suspects typically spend years simply ready for his or her instances to be heard, Marcos by no means served a day of her 42- to 77-year sentence for her 2018 conviction on seven counts of graft.
And can any individual please remind the VP that each time she decries the shortage of due course of in Lopez’s case, persons are reminded anew of how its absence has led to hundreds of extrajudicial killings throughout her father’s time period?
With a large number of situations of Girl Justice winking conspiratorially at a privileged few, how the authorities take care of the Dutertes’ felony acts—she for “masterminding” the potential homicide of three officers, and he for calling on the navy to intervene in “a fractured governance”—bears shut scrutiny. Will the related authorities lastly step up and show, as soon as and for all, that nobody is above the legislation?
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