Celebrity lawyer

It was one of the slow days in news last weekend when I got a phone call from our colleague, Carmen “Chit” Pedrosa. With a very excited voice from the other end of the line, Chit was telling me a juicy bit of news. Initially, I could not make heads or tails of what she was gushing about George Clooney, who happens to be one of my favorite actors in Hollywood.

Chit was interchangeably mentioning the name of Clooney with the initials of GMA (or former President and now Pampanga Rep. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo) and an Arabic foreign sounding name that I could not understand. I was getting lost in her story and finally cut in to ask: Amal who? 

Naturally, Chit recited a long list of clients being handled by Amal. Among them, she told me, Abdallah Al Senussi, former Libyan intelligence chief, in case of alleged crimes against humanity (International Criminal Court, The Hague); former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko in the human rights claim (European Court of Human Rights, Strasbourg); Julian Assange of Sweden, head of Wikileaks, in extradition proceedings (City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court, London); and, United Nations (UN) Special Envoy Kofi Annan’s advisor on Syria whose name Chit could not remember.

It finally dawned on me what she was talking about when she referred to the latest news from Hollywood that Clooney just got engaged to Amal Alamuddin, the chic international human rights lawyer. To make the long story short, Chit told me she was writing her next day’s column about Amal acting as “adviser” to GMA, albeit informally as it turned out.

Chit suggested if we could play up her juicy news item in the front page of The STAR coming out on the same day with her column on the opinion page. It’s not my call, I told Chit, but it could be a very good news item. So I asked Chit to submit it immediately to our editor-in-chief Amy Pamintuan. And that’s how it came out.

Per Chit’s account in her column “From a Distance” (reminds me of this popular Bette Midler song) last Sunday, Amal is the daughter of her long time friend Al-Hayat Foreign Editor Baria Alamuddin whom she met in London when she and her family lived there in exile during the Marcos regime.

While Chit was in London last year, she stayed at Amal’s flat where the latter mentioned to her about the cases she was handling at that time. “‘That is what I do,’ she says. Even political enemies have rights, when I told her about Arroyo’s case and if that can be brought before the UN Court. She said ‘Yes, of course if there is reason,’” Chit quoted her conversations with Amal.

Chit admitted she merely dismissed her conversations with Amal about her wish for her to also handle GMA’s case. Little did Chit expect Amal would later remember their conversations when the latter went to Manila en route to a speaking engagement in Singapore. “By the time she was on her way (back) to London, she committed to help former President Arroyo by advising her on her rights under international law. This was not about power politics but about human rights and every individual was entitled to it, she said,” Chit again quoted Amal telling her.

For whatever it was worth, Chit’s interesting story could perhaps lift the spirit of ailing GMA who, only last Saturday, had to be rushed to St. Luke’s Medical Center in Quezon City for yet another illness.

But only after lawyers and attending physicians of GMA got to convince the Sandiganbayan to allow her emergency trip after payment of P300,000 as provisional bond and to pay for the costs of additional security that took her to St.Luke’s that day. 

Facing non-bailable plunder case and separate electoral sabotage case, GMA has been placed under hospital detention since November 2010. She was transferred to the Veterans Memorial Medical Center (VMMC) in October 2012 where she has been in hospital detention.

Last Monday, Malacañang reportedly welcomed the purported plan of the lawyer-fiancee of Clooney to elevate before the UN the plight of the detained ex-President. Presidential Communications Operations Office Secretary Herminio Coloma Jr., however, assured the public it has never been the government’s policy under President Benigno “Noy” Aquino III to violate human rights of any person.

On stiff objections by government prosecutors, the Sandiganbayan has repeatedly junked bail petitions filed by GMA lawyers. Undaunted by repeated rejections, GMA lawyers filed anew last Monday another motion for reconsideration to grant bail for their very sick client.

Her lawyers have repeatedly argued GMA is not a flight risk. This is not only because she is an incumbent member of the 16th Congress but also because she could not physically do so given her frail state of health now. People who have visited her at the VMMC confirmed the 67-year-old former President looks so very thin and is down to a little more than 85 pounds or so.

Even her worst critics like former President and now Mayor of Manila, Joseph “Erap” Estrada found it in his heart to visit her at the VMMC two days before Christmas in December last year. Accompanied by his daughter Jackie, Mayor Estrada reiterated his opinion that GMA should be allowed to seek treatment abroad. Also once detained also at the VMMC while undergoing plunder trial, Estrada recalled GMA visited him twice and even granted him on humanitarian considerations to undergo knee surgery in Hong Kong.      

A wheelchair-bound GMA was set to board a Hong  Kong-bound plane on November 15, 2011 when she was dramatically stopped at the airport and prevented to leave the country. Three days later, the Pasay Regional Trial Court issued arrest order against her on electoral sabotage charges.

GMA’s last trip abroad before she fell ill was in Madrid where she attended the organizational meeting of the International Commission Against the Death Penalty (ICADP) in October 2010. She became one of the 15 founding members of ICADP along with other former leaders of other nations. The ICDP works with the UN and other international and regional organizations, governments and nongovernmental organizations to further the abolition of capital punishment worldwide.

Ex-President Arroyo abolished the death penalty in our country in 2006. So those wishing death penalty for alleged crimes of GMA could only sneeze at her having a celebrity lawyer taking up her case before UN.