EDITORIAL - Convoluted sense of justice

Filipino overseas worker Mae Vecina is back home a free woman after the emir of Kuwait, where she worked as a domestic, granted her full pardon. Vecina, abused by her employers, slew their seven-year-old son and was convicted by a Kuwaiti court and sentenced to death.

While it is natural for relatives and friends to feel happy and relieved at her extreme good luck, news stories and commentaries about Vecina tended to project her as some kind of a hero. For what, we neither know or understand.

But there should be a need to know because, inexplicably, this seems to be the way we react. Several years ago, many Filipinos, some of them in media, were about ready to go to war over another Filipino domestic, Flor Contemplacion, who killed her young ward in Singapore.

Contemplacion was also sentenced to death, in accordance with the sovereign laws of that country, for the murder which she did not deny. Yet Filipinos felt as if a great injustice was done, that a serious affront to our nationality was involved.

It is understandable, both as a fellow Filipino and as a human being, to feel some compunction and commiseration for the likes of Vecina and Contemplacion. But to place them above and beyond the crime they have committed is frighteningly insensitive and unfair.

We must bear in mind that while they are fellow Filipinos and are human beings just like the rest of us, that is as far as our similarities go. For unlike us, they have killed, they have taken human lives, and should be made to pay for it, not congratulated.

Not even the painful and difficult circumstances that may have driven them to kill can detract from the fact that they have killed. And an extraordinary development like a pardon, such as that granted to Vecina, cannot by any stretch necessitate adulation.

Vecina may have been abused. But that is not enough reason to kill. And she managed to escape with her life. The young boy she killed is dead forever. And if only for that fact, we Filipinos should show a little decency to the rest of the world by reining in our tactlessness.