CJ Puno: Ours not yet a full democracy

“For more than a hundred years, Filipinos have been aspiring to become a full democracy.”  Sad to say, Chief Justice Reynato S. Puno (ret.) told officers and members of the Philippine Constitution Association (Philconsa) that Freedom House, a US-based non-partisan organization, reported that in the year 2013, “for the nth time, the Philippines was rated as partly free, and not as a fully democratic state.”

Said Puno:  â€œThis has been the sorry story of our democracy. Since we won our independence from Spain, we have exerted robust efforts to erect a democratic regime in our country. We made that covenant in the Malolos Constitution, and in our 1935, 1937 and 1987 Constitutions. But after a century, our dream to establish a democratic state is turning out to be a delusion.”

He told the audience attending the (February 8th) celebration of Constitution Day, three reasons for not putting to bed the issue.

First, in a representative democracy, the people elect the officials who will govern them. “Election is the life force of a representative democracy for through the proper choice of rulers it avoids the unwieldiness of a democracy where the people rule directly.” Our electoral process has failed to pass basic criteria from beginning to end, i.e, it must be free from any form of unfairness, insulated from any species of fraud and immunized from any degree of discrimination. What happened is our elections are highly driven by dirty money.

According to him, “Our elections are controlled by political dynasties that continue to monopolize power in almost all our electoral units. Political dynasties result in a government of the few, and for the few, a government that is the antithesis of democracy.”

Second. We can never attain the status of ‘full democracy,’ unless we follow with unfailing fidelity, the rule of law. This simply means, said Puno, that those who govern the people must be under the law, and no one is above the law. “Those who govern must be accountable to the people. The transparency of the governing process must permit the citizenry to keep a watchful eye on state officials so as to detect corruption and punish those who perpetrate it. Corruption can strangle a democracy at any stage of development.”

Hence, legislatures must have real law–making powers as well as the right to hold the executives up to scrutiny. Then the judiciary must be independent of political manipulation by the executive and legislative branches, and the military must abide by the rule of democratic government and accept civilian control.

The former Chief Justice finds it sad that the rule of law “is weak in our country. Lawlessness rules in our streets where simple traffic rules are not enforced. Lawlessness has reared its ugly head in some branches of government where not infrequently no respect is given to the constitutional principle of separation of powers and its corollary doctrine of checks and balances.”

“When the sanctity of the touchstone principles is trashed, the inevitable result is eruption of corruption. The PDAF anomaly could not have happened if some of our legislators did not usurp the power of the Executive to implement our laws. By striking down the pork barrel practice, the Supreme Court bluntly ordered   legislators to stick to lawmaking and stop contracting.”

We are now waiting for the decision of the High Court on the so-called DAP petitions. The petitions will enable the High Court to elucidate and educate all and sundry how far the President can intrude into the power of the Congress over the purse. “The decision of the Court is ultra-important to our democracy for the powers between Congress and the President cannot be bound by blurred lines. A tiny error in drawing their balance can result in dominance by one branch over the other and give tyranny a toehold in the entire bureaucracy. Only an independent judiciary can decide without fear whether a powerful branch of government has overreached its powers.”

Chief Justice Puno cited events needed to “strengthen the sinews of independence” of the judiciary. One area of concern is its lack of financial independence from the political branches of government.  Every budget time, the judiciary has to crawl and beg Congress for sufficient funds, and DBM to release them.  The result is an anemic and demoralized judiciary with a lot of courts without judges, with rundown rented floors for salas and offices in buildings with dirty toilets, with insufficient staffs and without filing cabinets.

Another danger to the independence of the judiciary is the continuing threat of impeachment against some of its members.

In the Philippines, said the former Chief Justice, the Constitution gives the power to initiate impeachment proceedings exclusively to the House of Representatives and the power to try impeachment cases exclusively to the Senate.

In other jurisdictions, the awesome power to impeach is lodged in a body that is apolitical; whose composition are a mixture of jurists, barristers, academicians, and other major stakeholders of the constitutional system.

Third, if we want to qualify for a full democracy, there are certain democratic norms, which must be substantially satisfied. The norm of equality demands that human rights must be equitably distributed to everyone, that economic progress should not be restricted to the rich but should include the poor, for democracy cannot thrive on the poverty of the many.

Today, democracy is going to its third historical stage — from direct democracy to representative democracy and monitory democracy. Monitory democracy means a democracy where the people moment by moment monitor those who govern.  This has come about due to the declining distrust of people on their elected representatives. The emergence of monitory democracy is patent in our 1987 Constitution. Hence it established such independent offices as the COA, the Commission on Human Rights, the Office of the Ombudsman, an activist judiciary, and an interventionist civil society. 

Our 1987 Constitution stresses that sovereignty resides in the people and all government authority emanates from them. “The people are the sun of sovereignty and their representatives are but the moons that reflect the people’s sovereignty.  Prescinding from that premise, the 1987 Constitution affirmed the power of the sovereign people to remove through recall some elected officials, the power to enact local and national laws, and the power to change the Constitution itself.”

The CJ’s parting words: “We will never be a full democracy unless and until we fully enthrone the people as the real sovereign in our country.  â€œIf democracy has not fully flowered in the Philippines, it is because the people have been betrayed by some of their so-called representatives time and time again.  If democracy has not been deeply rooted in our soil, it is because it has often been hijacked by a small but powerful cabal of political and economic elite. Democracy will succeed in the Philippine only if we can stop these betrayals. Only the people can stop these betrayals. Let us support all initiatives of the people, all initiatives for the people and all initiatives by the people.”

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