Sunday, December 14, 2008

Let Senator Trillanes attend sessions

E·N·Q·U·I·R·Y
DEMAREE J.B RAVAL

Let Senator Trillanes attend sessions
Sunday, 10 28, 2007

Last week, I stated in this column how the administration might handle the dilemma over the continued incarceration of ousted President Joseph Estrada. Well, it seems the sitting President has done one better and opted for executive clemency. (That’s a neat use of a phrase: “executive clemency” instead of “pardon.”) Effectively, this move should shut me up in my rants and raves about Erap in prison. On a new tack, therefore, I am applying those reasons now, mutatis mutandis, to the case of another prisoner, Sen. Antonio Trillanes lV.

The United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for Non-Custodial Measures, or the Tokyo Rules, adopted by the UN General Assembly under Resolution 45/110 applies with equal force for the benefit of Trillanes.

The Tokyo Rules encourage the observance of alternatives to imprisonment, oftentimes referred to as “non-custodial measures.” It benefits all persons subject to prosecution, trial or the execution of a sentence, at all stages of the administration of criminal justice.

Non-custodial measures are allowed — with due regard to the personality and background of the offender and the protection of society — to avoid unnecessary use of (actual) imprisonment. This class of detention includes conditional discharge, economic sanctions and monetary penalties, house arrest, furlough and halfway houses, and other modes of non-institutional disposition. Simply put, it takes out the convict, or prisoner, out of the confining walls of a prison or government detention facility, and relocates him to serve his sentence or suffer detention elsewhere.

We have seen how Makati City Regional Trial Court Judge Oscar Pimentel allowed then candidate Trillanes to go out on a “pass” to be able to file his certificate of candidacy for the position of senator. He even allowed then senator-elect Trillanes to go to the Comelec premises to be proclaimed, and proceed to his house in Bulacan to take his oath before a barangay captain. So, the logic of why he would not allow now Trillanes to attend sessions of the Senate (or even conduct committee hearings in his place of detention in Fort Bonifacio) escapes me.

Trillanes is not to be given any special consideration. By right under the Tokyo Rules, and by force of his election to the office of senator, he should be allowed to attend sessions of the Senate, both in plenary and in the committees.

We said previously imprisonment simply means “the detention of a person contrary to his will. . . .The restraint on a person’s personal liberty; coercion exercised upon a person to prevent the free exercise of his powers of locomotion.” Case law abounds with rulings that “it is not a necessary part of the definition that the confinement should be in a place appropriated for that purpose; it may be in a locality used only for the specific occasion; or it may take place without the actual application of any physical agencies of restraints (such as locks or bars), as by verbal compulsion and the display of available force. Every confinement of a person is an ‘imprisonment,’ whether it be in a prison, or in a private house, or even by forcibly detaining one in the public streets.”

The fact alone that Trillanes — should he be allowed to attend sessions — will be under the watchful eyes of a phalanx of guards while discharging his duties as senator of the republic is already a restraint on his liberty of locomotion. And if it pleases his honor, Judge Pimentel can impose other conditions on Trillanes. He could confine the senator’s movements to the Senate Building, and ordain that the latter cannot go anywhere else other than to the Senate, or that he must leave for the Senate at a particular time and that he must be back to his jail cell also at a particular time. Judge Pimentel can put all these restrictions on the powers of locomotion of Trillanes.

As his detention (under the Tokyo Rules) need not be in a public jail facility, a better compromise — a happy medium, indeed — would be to place him under the custody of the Senate itself, be given his quarters at the Senate Building, under heavy guard, and from there he would be allowed to attend sessions. If Estrada was allowed, while under detention at the Veterans Hospital or in Tanay at his own resthouse, to discharge his political duties to the opposition, there should be no reason not to extend a similar treatment to Trillanes and allow him to discharge his duties to the millions of Filipinos that elected him senator of the land.

A more important point to consider is that Trilllanes, while his trial is going on before Judge Pimentel, enjoys the constitutional right of being presumed innocent. This is the very same right that allowed him to exercise his political and civil rights, such as the right to vote (which Judge Pimentel granted), run for public office (which Judge Pimentel allowed), be proclaimed and take his oath as senator (which Judge Pimentel recognized). And this should be the selfsame right that should enable him to perform his duties as senator (which Judge Pimentel must now allow).

As my friend Rod Kapunan had stated in his column some days ago, it is the duty of Judge Pimentel to make sure that the wishes of 11,189,671 who voted for Trillanes, expecting him to represent them in the august halls of the Senate, are not put to naught.



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