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Metro

Party-list nominee attends House sessions

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Alagad party-list nominee Diogenes Osabel has been attending the sessions of the House of Representatives since Dec. 10 to assert the right of the urban poor to be represented in Congress, although he has yet to be proclaimed by the Commission on Elections (Comelec).

The winning party-list group has been duly recognized by the Comelec, but its nominee has yet to be issued a certificate of proclamation needed to be able sit in Congress.

“I hope the Speaker and House members will not mind me for taking this bold move,” Osabel said.

“The long-delayed final resolution of our case and proclamation is seriously hurting us. If only to dissipate the creeping anxiety and sense of desperation in the ranks of our leaders nationwide, while awaiting formal proclamation, I hope the House will recognize and accommodate its unofficial member even as special observer.”

Osabel attended the Dec. 10 session in observance of international human rights day.

“We seek the House’s sympathy and understanding,” he said. “We are threatened (with) being waylaid in the exasperating, costly, tortuous and interminable legal processes at the Comelec.”

Osabel’s opponent, former Alagad congressman Rodante Marcoleta, has questioned his victory.

Marcoleta lost in the Comelec’s first division and the en banc, but is now seeking a motion for reconsideration and is asking for a rehearing.

Marcoleta also filed an impeachment complaint against acting Comelec Chairman Resurreccion Borra and Commissioner Romeo Brawner for refusing to recognize him as the Alagad nominee.

“They favored an interloper, an Alagad impostor who still claims to be president of the party until today despite the expiration of his term in 2000,” Marcoleta said.

“And by violating their (poll body executives) own rules, they culpably violated the Constitution.”

Marcoleta, a lawyer by profession, said Borra and Brawner – a former Court of Appeals justice – “lied through their teeth.”

“They vowed to resolve the dispute based solely on the party’s constitution and bylaws,” he said.

“(They) did not even read the three-and-a-half page document. Purely based on conjecture and speculation, they decided the case in nearly five months instead of the five-day period mandated by their own rules.”

Borra and Brawner “personify the institution’s public image in that they may strive to be exemplary guardians of its embattled credibility or may elect to be deadweights that may pull Comelec further into the brink of ignominy,” Marcoleta said. – Delon Porcalla

ALAGAD

BORRA AND BRAWNER

COMELEC

COMELEC CHAIRMAN RESURRECCION BORRA AND COMMISSIONER ROMEO BRAWNER

OSABEL

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