MANILA, 27 July 2006 — Yet another impeachment complaint against President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, the seventh, was filed yesterday in the Philippine House of Representatives.
The complainants, numbering more than 200, were led by the parents of two missing University of the Philippines students who were allegedly abducted by army soldiers in a province north of Manila.
Representatives Satur Ocampo, Teodoro Casiño, and Joel Virador, Liza Maza and Rafael Mariano, all of the Leftist bloc, endorsed the complaint in compliance with the rules of Congress.
Last Tuesday, Rep. Joel Villanueva endorsed the sixth complaint filed by more than 1,000 individuals, mostly members of the Citizens’ Battle Against Corruption (Cibac).
An eighth complaint is expected to be filed by the opposition today.
The latest complaint was no different from the six. It contained the same charges — electoral fraud, graft and corruption, extra judicial killings, among others.
Signatories of the previous complaints included bishops, priests, retired generals, businessmen, professors, students, leftist activists and opposition politicians.
Impeachment proponents said the serial filing was intended to cover all the possible dates that may be used by the president’s allies to raise questions of technicality on the one-complaint-a-year rule. Last year, Arroyo’s allies threw out three impeachment complaints on the mere grounds of technicality.
Which One?
Ocampo said the complaint, which they endorsed yesterday, might be the one that would be recognized by the justice committee, tasked under House rules to determine whether any or all of the complaints were sufficient in form and substance before sending one or all of them to the plenary for deliberations.
As required by the Philippine Constitution, another impeachment complaint against the same impeachable official can be filed only after one year from the filing of the first one.
Lawyer Oliver Lozano filed the first impeachment complaint against Arroyo on June 27, 2005, but this was referred to the committee only on July 25.
Lozano’s complaint and two others were dismissed eventually by the House.
Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman, the author of the “prejudicial questions” that became instrumental in the dismissal of the impeachment case against Arroyo last year, said the six impeachment complaints were “prohibited complaints” because they were filed within the one-year ban.
He said the ban will only end today because the impeachment complaint filed against Arroyo last year was referred to the justice vommittee “on July 26, 2005, at 4:20 p.m.”
Ocampo said the president should be impeached especially because of “gross violation of human rights” she allegedly committed since she assumed office in 2001.
He said 690 political killings had been recorded since January 2001.
But instead of investigating Maj. Gen. Jovito Palparan, the alleged perpetrator of these killings, the group of party-list congressmen lamented how the president even extolled him during her State of the Nation Address on Monday.
Not Sitting on the Cases
Speaker Jose de Venecia on Tuesday referred the six complaints to the committee amid allegations that he was sitting on the cases.
“Let it not be said that the Speaker of the House did not transmit one day after the opening of Congress the six impeachment complaints against the president of the republic,” se Venecia said, adding: “I’ve done my constitutional duty following the precedent we set last year.”
Arroyo’s foes accused De Venecia of deliberately sitting on the complaints after he said, in his speech opening the House session on Monday, that he was “confused” as to which of the complaints to transmit to the justice committee.
Majority Leader Prospero Nograles said he expected the committee chaired by Maguindanao Rep. Simeon Datumanong to complete its hearings on the complaints and have a vote by the end of next month.
Datumanong said the committee might hold its first hearing next week.
“The committee will act on it accordingly. ... “We have to read all of these complaints first before we take them on. Even the Supreme Court justices have to read entire petitions before discussing them.” (With reports from Inquirer News Service
