Denial of justice in both RP and US

“Victims of speedy, but false, justice.” This is how Supreme Court Justice Antonio Carpio depicts the five men whom a Quezon City regional trial court convicted in August 1999 for the 1996 killing of retired Col. Rolando Abadilla, chief of the notorious Metrocom Intelligence and Security Group under martial law. The Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction in April 2008. Last September 15 the Supreme Court, voting 10-4, upheld the CA decision.

The five men should have been acquitted, Carpio asserts in his dissenting opinion, because they were denied their basic rights to due process and to be represented by counsel during police investigation, a “blatant and unacceptable transgression of their constitutional rights.”

RTC Judge Jaime Salazar convicted the “Abadilla 5” on two grounds: 1) the uncorroborated testimony of one eyewitness (Carpio says the testimony has six major defects and evidently the police coached the witness), and 2) the “confessions” extracted from the accused through torture (Amnesty International attests that their torture accounts are credible). The Alex Boncayao Brigade of the New People’s Army publicly owned responsibility for killing Abadilla, yet the courts ignored the admission.

Sadly, this is so common we are not surprised; shouldn’t we be outraged? In the United States a similar case, worse than the Abadilla 5, has spurred international protests.

This is the case of five Cuban men, dubbed as the “Cuban 5.” They were arrested in Miami, Florida in September 1998, accused and convicted of 26 counts of violating US federal laws. The most serious charges were conspiracies to commit espionage, and to commit murder. The jury that convicted them was composed mostly of anti-Cuban Miami residents. At the trial in 2000, two American generals, an admiral, and a White House presidential adviser gave testimonies favorable to them. Still the jury gave a guilty verdict. The five went to the Court of Appeals.

Meantime, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention reviewed the case and concluded that the rights of the Cuban 5 were violated and urged the US to rectify the breach. In August 2005, a three-judge panel unanimously ruled that the Cuban 5 were denied their fundamental rights to a fair trial and ordered their release. The Bush administration asked for a review by the full court; in August 2006 a majority of the 12 judges reversed the ruling.

Support for the Cuban 5 built up worldwide: from 10 Nobel laureates, the former High Commissioner for Human Rights, the UNESCO Director General, two former European Union presidents, the Mexican Senate, Panama’s National Assembly, 75 European Parliament members, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, legal and human rights groups in Europe, Asia, Latin America and the US. Yet, on June 15, 2009 the US Supreme Court, without explanation, declared it would not review the case.

One of the Cuban 5, Gerardo Hernandez, meted two life sentences plus 15 years, plans to file a habeas corpus petition at the SC as a last legal recourse. On the other hand, one of the Abadilla 5, Lenido Lumanog, says he has lost trust in the judicial system and hopes to elicit executive clemency from President Aquino — which would not solve the injustice issue.

The big question raised on the two cases is why the RP and US appellate and supreme courts appear to have played deaf and blind to — or consciously abetted — the obvious, blatant denial of justice and due process.

In the US case it is easier to see why. The Bush administration left a legacy of having deliberately denied the civil, political and human rights of foreigners it deemed as enemies of America. And President Barack Obama has increasingly adopted the inhumane policies and practices of the warmonger George W. Bush.

For instance, the International Herald Tribune reported recently that Obama’s national security team has “authorized the CIA to try to kill a US citizen suspected of terrorism, blocked efforts by detainees in Afghanistan to bring habeas corpus lawsuits challenging the basis for their imprisonment without trial, and continued the CIA’s so-called extraordinary rendition program of prisoner transfers [transferring prisoners to US-allied countries where they are tortured]…”

Worse, the Obama administration is getting judicial backing. Last September 9, the US Court of Appeals, by 6-5 vote, upheld Obama’s invoking of the “state-secret privilege” doctrine (to safeguard national security) to stop a lawsuit filed by five former US prisoners who claimed they had been tortured in detention. As in the Cuban 5 case, the lawsuit was given due course by a three-judge panel in April 2009, but Obama appealed to the en-banc court for a reversal and got it.

A similar trend seems to be happening here. Last September 7, the SC voted, 13-0, to reverse the August 26, 2009 CA decision granting a writ of habeas data petition (a right against building up of dossiers on a person) to Fil-Am activist Melissa Roxas. She was abducted, interrogated for days and nights, later released by suspected state security forces.  

Bad signs of the times.