Press Release
May 11, 2018

Dispatch from Crame No. 305:
SEN. LEILA M. DE LIMA'S STATEMENT ON CJ SERENO'S OUSTER BY THE SUPREME COURT

5/11/18

The Supreme Court decision ousting Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno is probably the greatest travesty of justice committed by the High Court since the 1973 case of Javellana v. Executive Secretary, where the Supreme Court then ushered in the era of the Marcos Dictatorship. This one ushers in another era of another dictatorship as the Court once again puts an end to the last gasps of a dying constitutional democracy.

Signed by justices who themselves hurled complaints and grievances against the Chief Justice and who testified against her before the House of Representatives, the decision carries the judge-jury-executioner type of justice that is only handed down by kangaroo courts. This is the sum and substance of the Court's action ousting Sereno.

No amount of legal sophistry and gobbledygook can hide the fact that the Court not only violated the constitutional provision that members of the Court can only be removed by impeachment. More than that, the decision in effect proclaimed the Supreme Court as supreme over the Constitution itself. Beyond interpreting the Constitution, the Court is now the editor of the supreme law, changing it whenever the Court deems it to be so convenient under the guise of interpretation.

The Supreme Court wants to be the law of the land and rule through judicial tyranny. President Duterte now has his partnership. But this partnership won't last long. There can only be one absolute despot, and it will not be the justices of the Court.

The majority of the justices would like to think that they had just made the Supreme Court more powerful with Sereno's ouster. Quite the contrary, they have just destroyed it together with the rest of the judiciary. Nothing will now stop Duterte from finishing off the rest of our democratic institutions.

St. Thomas More said that the devil can be stopped so long as the laws of the land are not entirely mowed down, because it is the law that stands between us and the devil. Sereno was not given the benefit of law. The Court has cut down the supreme law of the land just to remove her. We might have just witnessed the cutting of the last law that still stands between us and the devil.

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