All the president’s men

When I was composing this article yesterday, the city began to feel the full impact of the total lockdown which was announced only almost midnight of Tuesday. The eerie announcement began with a simple notice that all quarantine passes were suspended. It meant that consequence to the invalidation of the passes, nobody in Cebu City, would be allowed to leave his home.

This harsh initial directive came from Secretary Eduardo Año of the Department of the Interior and Local Government. Año reportedly came with a star studded team, literally and figuratively speaking, sent by President Rodrigo Duterte to Cebu City to attempt to address the spiraling coronavirus infection hereabouts. Imagine that Generals Roy Cimatu and Delfin Lorenzana and Sec Francisco Duque came with Año.

 Pres. Duterte, designated Cimatu as his point man. The president instructed the retired general to come to our city, gather all information and report to Malacanang his findings. It seems the scope of Cimatu’s work is all-encompassing as the presidential order sets no limits. I will thus take advantage of the presence of all the presidents’ men in our midst in bringing up a thing that, true to the off tangent nature of this column, is apparently still out of the scope of our leaders. I hope that Cimatu, Año, Lorenzana and Duque can pick this item up and bring it to the president.

I captioned my March 19 column this way: “WHO WILL BE HELD LIABLE FOR COVID-19?” This was what I wrote then: “There is no doubt that CoViD 19 has wrought unimaginable damage throughout the world. x x x Since there is yet no announced cure for it, all efforts are focused in trying to prevent its transmission. As a dreaded consequence of quarantine like isolation of people, most productive human activities have ground to unexpected halt. There is no telling the day when infections are totally aborted. Weeks? Months? Nobody knows. So, when medical science finally finds a cure for this pandemic, the damage will be staggering.

What comes after CoViD-19 is finally solved? China is where this virus started. As I said above, some social media sources claim that the Corona virus is one of the arsenals in Chinese biological warfare which it unleashed for the world to suffer and I do not want to believe it. Others claim that it was rather a lack of diligence by a Chinese functionary in its handling that started the spread of the virus and this assertion may be more credible. Just the same, in the certainty that a Wuhan, China laboratory pricked open, by design or by accident, whatever seal that kept corona virusand had to spread it to the world, the question as to whether China may be held responsible comes to fore.

 The world legal theater opens soon after mankind defeats CoViD 19. That is inevitable. Someonemust account for the deaths of thousands and the sickness of hundreds of thousands more. To me China has to pay for the economic upheaval its Corona virus caused throughout the world. In international law, there is this concept known as State Responsibility. It is a liability more anchored on Torts although the act of a Chinese government agency in starting the spread of the virus may also be deemed “an internationally wrongful act.”

According to D. J. Harris, in his book Cases and Materials on International Law, a “state is responsible, xxx if it damages the territory or property of another state.” While Harris himself admits that this theory “is not very well developed,” our legal scholars have the duty to explore all legal angles to make China responsible for the damages our people have suffered.

Is this issue worth the time of all the president’s men now here in Cebu City to take up with him?