Too much laws, too little life - I

Pres R. Magsaysay, paraphrasing an old libertarian maxim of Thomas Jefferson, coined the famous slogan: “ He who has less in life should have more in law.” Today, six decades later, the OFWs observe, those words prove prophetic. The situations of many distressed Filipino migrant workers precisely can be described as “more laws, with less life”.

I would have been remiss in my sworn duties as a public servant posted in the frontlines abroad, if I did not tell the people at home of their true feelings. They may be a little overstressed or exaggerated. Nonetheless, this is what they truly feel. And this column is supposed to be to report direct from the OFWs.

Truly,our country is perhaps the best in the world when it comes to making laws, “magna carta”, we love to call them for all sorts of subjects, from the more draconian to the most trivial. If we can only export our statutes to Yemen or Zambia, or perhaps sell our legal acumen in parliamentary procedures to Afghanistan or Herzegovina, and generate foreign exchanges, we may be able to balance our trade and infuse our economy with dollars.

We may yet become a tiger economy, without having to export household service workers to Saudi Arabia or rely on the remittances of our migrant workers. The only problem with us is that the degree of our excellence in making laws is inversely proportionate to our competence and political will in implementation. This is further exacerbated by the fact that, while we are excellent in enacting laws, we often overlook to allocate adequate resources for their implementation.

In 1974, during the employment boom in Saudi Arabia, the Martial Ruler gave us a Labor Code, the centerpiece of which was a Charter for overseas employment. It laid down the basic legal framework for recruitment, but it failed to put in place enough safety nets to protect our migrant workers from cruel employers, greedy recruiters and scheming usurers, travel agents, medical clinics and middlemen.

From 1974 to 1994, thousands of OFWs were maltreated, abused, some of them murdered, raped, falsely accused and jailed, and even hanged and executed via the most inhuman and archaic and unchristian way of killing by decapitation and hanging.There were many cases of Sarah Balabagans and J. de la Cruz but it reached a boiling point in Delia Maga and Flor Contemplacion.

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