Pre-election citizenship cases vs Poe revived

Lawyers who questioned the citizenship of defeated presidential candidate Fernando Poe Jr. earlier this year revived their cases yesterday to show the actor lacked the standing to file an election protest and claim the presidency.

In separate answers-in-intervention filed before the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET), lawyers Victorino Fornier, Ma. Jeanette Tecson and Felix Desiderio reiterated their claims that Poe was not a natural-born Filipino and not qualified to run for president in the May 10 elections in the first place.

"Considering that the protestant’s objective in his petition/protest is to claim the presidency for himself, upon his failure to conclusively prove that he is a natural-born Filipino citizen, or a showing that he is not so, his election protest would be nothing but an empty and mischievous exercise in futility," Fornier said.

Tecson and Desiderio said the final determination of Poe’s citizenship would determine Poe’s "standing or the lack of it" to file a protest before the tribunal.

Last March, the Supreme Court declared Poe a natural-born Filipino citizen qualified to run in the May elections. The SC en banc held that the Commission on Elections (Comelec) did not commit grave abuse of discretion when it ruled that Poe was fit to seek the highest elective office in the land.

In a 53-page decision penned by now retired Justice Jose Vitug, the SC gave weight to the arguments of the four amici curiae or "friends of the court," who all said Poe was a natural-born Filipino citizen under the terms of the 1935 Constitution since his father was a Filipino as shown by the evidence in the SC’s possession.

Section 1 (3) Article 4 of the 1935 Constitution provides that "those whose fathers are citizens of the Philippines" are considered Filipino citizens.

But the lawyers maintained the SC did not make any categorical ruling on Poe’s citizenship. They argued the high court’s decision merely stated that while "the totality of evidence may not establish conclusively that respondent (Poe) is a natural-born Filipino citizen of the Philippines, the evidence on hand still would preponderate in his favor enough to hold that he cannot be held guilty of having made a material misrepresentation in his certificate of candidacy."

The lawyers said Poe was not qualified to run because he was an illegitimate child of American Bessie Kelley. They stressed Poe should have followed his mother’s citizenship since he was born out of wedlock.

They contended neither Poe nor his parents undertook the legal process to legitimize him and make him a natural-born Filipino fit to become the country’s president.

Poe’s erstwhile running mate, former senator Loren Legarda, said yesterday the administration camp’s shallow arguments against their electoral protests before the PET strengthened their belief that they have a strong case.

Legarda said criticisms that their electoral protests "have grammatical and clerical errors" are not enough to convince the PET to dismiss their petitions.

"To belittle a petition on the basis of a clerical or typographical error is to show there is really no basis for a counter protest ... It is an act of desperation," she said.

Vice President Noli de Castro had accused Legarda of "copying verbatim" the protest of Poe to the point that she claimed to have won the presidential elections.

Legarda, however, chided the administration for not reading through the protests she and Poe filed separately. She denied to have "copied and pasted" the words of his electoral protest because they identified different areas where there were indications of massive fraud.

In her protest, Legarda questioned the results in 120,000 precincts.

President Arroyo and De Castro, in filing their answers and counter protests, said Poe and Legarda should have filed their petitions before the Comelec, not the PET, since they were complaining about a failure of elections through massive fraud.

But Legarda said the administration is playing a "merry-go-round" with them because during the congressional canvassing, pro-administration lawmakers would advise them to bring the issue before PET whenever they would question the results on certificates of canvass (COCs).

Mrs. Arroyo again raised the issue of Poe’s citizenship, saying that he did not have the legal capacity to file the protest because his claim to being a Filipino remains questionable.

Mrs. Arroyo also said Poe failed to identify the precincts where the alleged fraud had been committed — a fatal omission in an electoral protest.

Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel Jr. said Legarda presented a strong protest before the PET and that opening 15 to 25 COCs can erase the lead of Mrs. Arroyo and De Castro in the recent elections.

Mrs. Arroyo led Poe by more than a million votes, while De Castro’s edge over Legarda is about 800,000 votes.

Pimentel said the PET can resolve the protests within seven or eight months, "but of course, I am being very optimistic because we have the facts, we have the data, we have the election returns. Their lead in Cebu, Bohol, Iloilo and Pangasinan will be wiped out."— With Evelyn Macairan