EDITORIAL - Selective compassion

Her blood pressure is better than most other people and there are stories emanating from the Philippine Heart Center that she is smoking in her hospital room. Doctors who examined her in another hospital last Friday said all her health indicators were “unremarkable” – meaning there was no problem.

And yet Jessica “Gigi” Reyes remained confined yesterday at the Heart Center, undergoing all sorts of medical tests that would allow her to evade detention at Camp Bagong Diwa in Bicutan.

Inmates in the facility operated by the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology said Reyes, who wants to be detained in the same Camp Crame facility as senators including her boss Juan Ponce Enrile, said she never set foot in her cell at Camp Bagong Diwa. Reports said that as soon as her relatives left, Reyes swooned and had to be rushed by BJMP guards to a nearby government hospital.

This was at 1 in the morning. In that late hour, there was supposedly a doctor around to tell BJMP guards that an inmate needed to be rushed to a hospital even without clearance from the Sandiganbayan. Until yesterday, there was no such court clearance. This is allowed in life-threatening cases, but going by the diagnosis at the first hospital, the only thing that might have actually afflicted Reyes was a mild headache and a panic attack that any ordinary person would likely suffer on the first day of detention in a Philippine jail.

Every inmate deserves humane treatment including proper health care. Unfortunately, however, whether at the New Bilibid Prison or Camp Bagong Diwa, only moneyed and well-connected detainees get this humane treatment in private hospitals.

Consider the attention – or lack of it, according to some reports – given by BJMP personnel to suspected communist rebel Andrea Rosal, who was seven months pregnant when she was arrested. Detainees said Rosal, granddaughter of New People’s Army leader Rogelio Rosal, did not receive medical attention and was confined too late at the Philippine General Hospital when she started having childbirth contractions. The infant died a day after birth.

Compare this with the mollycoddling of Reyes by the BJMP, which is an executive agency under the Department of the Interior and Local Government. The daang matuwid administration must reassure the nation that there is no selective compassion in the treatment of inmates.