MANILA, Philippines—President Benigno Aquino has again placed himself in opposition to the Supreme Court, declaring himself an enemy of plagiarism and standing squarely behind the 37 faculty members of the UP College of Law being threatened with disciplinary action for criticizing a high court justice accused of plagiarism.
Mr. Aquino said authorities shouldn’t threaten persons who are exposing the truth in order to cover up for those who are at fault.
“It isn’t always easy to take the straight path. Our views are the same on this matter,” the President told the graduates and faculty members of the college at their grand alumni homecoming in Makati City late Friday.
“One should not lie, one should not copy and one should not steal or use analysis without permission or proper attribution,” he added.
The Supreme Court recently ordered the 37 members of UP law school faculty to explain why they shouldn’t be sanctioned for unethical conduct when they released a joint statement accusing Associate Justice Mariano del Castillo of plagiarizing parts of a decision he wrote on the case of Filipino “comfort women.”
“Those in high positions shouldn’t intimidate or threaten persons who only want to freely express their own opinion and come out with the truth,” Mr. Aquino said.
“I am with the UP College of
Law, especially its 37 members, in their objective to make straight the crooked path,” he said.
Bad precedent
From the
Senate came support for the 37 from Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago, herself a UP law school alumna.
The
senator said the 37 faculty members should in fact be “commended for being so vigilant that they can catch certain plagiarized quotations in Supreme Court decisions.”
“That is an extraordinary skill. I don’t think they should be faulted for doing what they did. So I support the case of the UP faculty,” she told
reporters.
Santiago said the high tribunal’s decision that ruled Del Castillo innocent would set a bad precedent in terms of handling plagiarism cases in the future.
The ruling said the plagiarism was the result of an accident, when Del Castillo’s researcher mistakenly deleted the footnotes attributing portions of the decision to the works of four international legal luminaries.
“The accidental decapitation of attributions to sources of research materials is not remote,” the high court said, placing the blame on “the Microsoft program in use by the Court.”
But Santiago, an international law expert and a former trial court judge, did not buy the argument.
Unforgivable crime
“You can make all kinds of excuses of why there is no attribution, but if you are the signed author of a document, let’s say a decision of the Supreme Court, you are the last person to read the document so you will be able to catch all imperfections in that document,” she said.
“Besides, once you affix your signature you should be ready to defend your work.”
Santiago noted that campus administrations are more strict in handling cases of plagiarism.
“In colleges and universities, without reaching the level of responsibility of a Supreme Court justice, a student caught plagiarizing is immediately flunked or kicked out of school,” she said.
“So I don’t know what kind of moral example is given by the actuation, so far, of certain parties,” she said.
“In the intellectual world, plagiarism should be considered, in effect, an unforgivable crime,” Santiago said.
Limiting Aquino’s powers
Political analyst Ramon Casiple said the President and the Supreme Court appear to be “checking out each other,” with the high court’s decisions bordering on interference in other branches of government and the President being angered by them.
Casiple, executive director of the Institute for Political and
Electoral Reform, said he is on Mr. Aquino’s side on this issue, noting that the high court appears to be “interfering in the processes of its two coequal branches of
government.”
“The No. 1 issue in politics now is the Supreme Court, which is ironic because there is supposed to be separation of powers,” he said.
“The Supreme Court’s latest decisions show that it is more than willing to meddle in government initiatives. It becomes a political thing in the sense that it is trying to define the limits of the powers of the President. This is a grave issue,” Casiple said.
That’s why the President is angry, he said.
He cited two cases: the status quo ante order the high tribunal issued on the petition of Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez against the House of Representatives committee on justice on the issue of the impeachment complaint against her; and the temporary restraining order issued on a petition of Omera Lucman against Executive Order No. 2, which removed the so-called midnight appointees of former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
Aquino’s beef with SC
The President angrily reacted when the high court stopped the implementation of EO 2 in the case of Lucman, who had gone to the high court to protest her removal as head of the National Commission on Muslim Filipinos.
He warned that the decision would have dire consequences, including a government paralyzed by court cases filed by those who want to get their old jobs back.
The President also has petitions against three other executive orders of his pending in the high court—EO 1 creating the truth commission to investigate corruption in the Arroyo administration, EO 3 which revoked Arroyo’s directive giving government lawyers the rank of career
executive service officer (Ceso) III, and EO 7, suspending all allowances, bonuses and incentives of officials of government-owned and -controlled corporations and financial institutions.
Last week, Mr. Aquino wrote to Chief Justice Renato Corona to appeal against the high court’s decision banning television coverage of the trial of Ampatuan clan members and their coaccused in connection with the Maguindanao massacre.
Closer to home, the Supreme Court also has yet to rule on the Hacienda Luisita dispute over the redistribution under the government’s agrarian reform program of the sugar estate owned by the President’s family.
Aquino’s prerogative
Though he is not a
lawyer, Casiple said he believes the Supreme Court should have allowed the House justice committee to continue with the impeachment proceedings as Gutierrez could still appeal at that level.
As for the Lucman case, he said that it was still Mr. Aquino’s “prerogative” on who he wanted appointed to government positions.
“That’s the home of the executive, so to speak. Whatever decisions he makes in his home should be respected,” Casiple said.
Courting impeachment
Casiple warned that the high tribunal was “courting a political response” with actions that slighted the executive and legislative departments.
“They (the justices) might be the ones who could be impeached,” he said.
On the plagiarism issue, Casiple said the high court appears to be “self-destructing.”
“The Supreme Court is standing its ground. They don’t want to listen. In this plagiarism case, the most that they can do is to be graceful about its exit. Instead, it is putting up fortresses. I wonder what got into the heads of the 10 justices? They seem to be working as a bloc,” Casiple said
Source: Philippine Daily Inquirer.
