The CJ Davide decision on environmental protection

The DPWH and DENR officials who made it possible for greedy contractors to perpetrate a scam of ghost and substandard flood control projects, as well as the senators and congressmen, budget officials and LGU executives to connive and plunder the nation of trillions in peoples' money and allowed the ravage of our environment should all be ashamed of themselves. Mahiya naman sila.

In the landmark Supreme Court Decision penned by Chief Justice Hilario Davide Jr., in the case of Juan Antonio Oposa et al v. DENR Sec. Fulgencio Factoran Jr. et al, GR no 101083, the Supreme Court En Banc gave us all, contractors and corrupt officials included, a magnum opus lecture on the need to care for our environment. If they are convicted of the crimes that are about to be filed by the Ombudsman, one of the penalties is for all of them to read 100 times every day this landmark Davide ponencia.

Davide wrote: "While the right to a balanced and healthful ecology is to be found under the Declaration of Principles and State Policies and not under the Bill of Rights, it does not follow that it is less important than any of the civil and political rights enumerated in the latter. Such a right belongs to a different category of rights altogether for it concerns nothing less than self-preservation and self-perpetuation — aptly and fittingly stressed by the petitioners — the advancement of which may even be said to predate all governments and constitution.

"As a matter of fact, these basic rights need not even be written in the Constitution for they are assumed to exist from the inception of humankind. If they are now explicitly mentioned in the fundamental charter, it is because of the well-founded fear of its framers that unless the rights to a balanced and healthful ecology and to health are mandated as state policies by the Constitution itself, thereby highlighting their continuing importance and imposing upon the state a solemn obligation to preserve the first and protect and advance the second, the day would not be too far when all else would be lost not only for the present generation, but also for those to come — generations which stand to inherit nothing but parched earth incapable of sustaining life."

Davide emphasized, in this case that the right to a balanced and healthful ecology carries with it the correlative duty to refrain from impairing the environment. The said right implies, among many other things, the judicious management and conservation of the country's forests. Without such forests, the ecological or environmental balance would be irreversibly disrupted. Davide held that all these are conformably with the enunciated right to a balanced and healthful ecology and the right to health, as well as the other related provisions of the Constitution concerning the conservation, development and utilization of the country's natural resource.

Davide specified: "President Corazon C. Aquino promulgated on 10 June 1987 E.O. No. 192, 14 Section 4 of which expressly mandates that the Department of Environment and Natural Resources "shall be the primary government agency responsible for the conservation, management, development and proper use of the country's environment and natural resources, specifically forest and grazing lands, mineral, resources, including those in reservation and watershed areas, and lands of the public domain, as well as the licensing and regulation of all natural resources as may be provided for by law in order to ensure equitable sharing of the benefits derived therefrom for the welfare of the present and future generations of Filipinos".

The Supreme Court set aside the private respondents invocation of the non-impairment clause as a defense against the police power of the state to protect the natural environment. The highest court of the land led by a valiant Cebuano chief justice denied the private corporation's motion to dismiss. Its right to private property cannot prevail over the more fundamental and more compelling right of the people to a balanced ecology and a healthful natural environment.

What matters most, to me, is that two patriotic Cebuanos, Chief Justice Davide Jr. and Atty. Antonio Oposa have stood up gallantly to defend Mother Nature against the greed of conscienceless businessmen and corrupt public officials. We, Cebuanos, should all be proud of Davide and Oposa. Their faithful adherence to what is right should constitute a continuing slap to the faces of greedy contractors and corrupt public officials. Mahiya naman kayo.