By Rod Kapunan
No legal theoretician or political scientist has ever come to make a deduction that we have in our midst a pathetic legislative body that one cannot find anywhere else in the world. Unlike the legislative bodies of sovereign states, their legislators act on behalf of their people. Having been elected as their representatives, they dutifully safeguard their people's lives, liberties, and privacy. Their primordial concern is strictly circumscribed to protecting and securing their interest and their independence. They would not care less if the draft law sought to be reenacted has assumed the character of international law.
This observation which has been happening to us is pretty dangerous. Many of our laws that have lately been enacted were of foreign origin handed to us for approval by foreign governments and international organizations seeking to validate the enforcement of their interest through these laws. This traitorous act of incorporating them as our own has the effect of reducing the country to a banana republic by legislative fiat with the most sordid consequence of enforcing their interest right here in our own backyard.
When the members of the US Congress debate on the salient points of a proposed bill or argue on the necessity to approve it, they measure its efficacy on whether it would affect the life, liberty, and privacy of their people. Their being critical even becomes passionate if they could sense it would have repercussions to their foreign policy even if touted as an international covenant. A classic case was the unexpected decision by the US Congress not to ratify its membership in the League of Nations, a pet project initiated no les by President Woodrow Wilson.
In our country, the members of our legislative body do not go through the tedious process of hemming every provision of those foreign laws handed to them for enactment. They no longer act by the instinct of their mandate, like analyzing whether the laws they are about to adopt as our own would affect the status of this nation as an independent state. As unwitting lackeys, they blindly approve them as told, justifying their position that it is part of our commitment as a member of the community of nations, even if it is obvious that our incorporation of those laws could effectively place this country well within the jurisdictional corral of the US and of its allied.
Pretending to avoid being detected as surrogates working for the interest of a foreign power, these traitorous legislators would justify their collaborationist attitude saying that a number of the client states of the US and its allies in the European Union and NATO has already incorporated those laws as part of their domestic laws. Classic to this was our literal approval of the International copyright and intellectual property right law and the anti-money laundering act. These laws effectively dismantled the remaining vestiges for us to assert our authority as an independent state. We were not even accorded the liberty of introducing amendments.
To recall, many could not understand why then Senator Leticia Ramos-Shahani introduced a resolution in the Senate officially dropping our Sabah claim. Maybe there was no way for us to enforce our valid claim, but we have to insist, it being part of our national pride, just anybody who would initiate a resolution dropping it could be branded as a traitor. The same can be said of our ratification for membership in the International Criminal Court. The paradox is our legislators did not explain that while the US has been pressuring us to join, its own Congress refused to ratify their membership to the ICC. Effectively, we waived our jurisdiction over our own soldiers, and can now be held liable for war crimes, genocide, atrocities or for human rights violation, the same crimes we cannot even enforce to American soldiers committing similar crimes here.
Lately the US, through State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, informed the Aquino administration of its desire to support our decision to bring our dispute with China over those islets in the West Philippine Seas for arbitration before the International Tribunal on the Law of the Seas. The announcement amounted to making the leaders of this country appear before the eyes of the international communities as bunch of buffoons. As one would ask, how could the US issue such endorsement when it has refused to ratify the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea?
The same can be said of the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012. Again, under intense pressure from the US, the proposed amendment intends to incorporate a “catch-all†provision; that all offenses currently punishable under the Revised Penal Code can be punished with more severity when committed using a computer. Most dangerous is the provision on universal jurisdiction to punish Filipino nationals for violation of the cyber crime law regardless of where they committed said crime. Many are objecting because even in the US, their laws on cyber crimes have been the subject of debate and legal question principally for violating the right of the individual to privacy of communication and correspondence.
We are compelled to cite all these to differentiate the role now being played by our local legislators from their counterparts in the US and in other countries. The irony is many of those laws they want us to swallow by legislative reenactment have been rejected by their own congress. Here, our lawmakers are racing to reenact them as if to prove it that they are the most energetic and faithful lackey. For their cowardly abdication of their legislative duty, we have lost our sovereignty by technical fiat, and conversely reduced our legislative branch of government as mere rubber stamp of the US and of its European allies.
rpkapunan@gmail.com
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