SC’s absurd response to Bato: ‘You’re still free, aren’t you?’
THE Supreme Court’s refusal to issue a temporary restraining order (TRO) or even a status quo ante order in favor of Sen. Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa will go down in history as one of the high tribunal’s most astonishingly legalistic — and absurd — rulings.
The more one reads the majority ruling and the dissents, the clearer it becomes that the court elevated procedural technicalities over reality.
The ruling dated May 20 — which strangely was without a ponente or writer of a decision, with nine justices concurring and five dissenting — declared:
“There is no material and substantial invasion of Senator Dela Rosa’s rights. He was also given protective custody by the Senate in the interim, which prevented the alleged service or implementation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant, as well as his arrest. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. declared that he has not issued an instruction or directive to arrest Senator Dela Rosa. “Hence, Senator Dela Rosa’s claimed invasion of his purported rights is more imagined than real.”
Can’t they see that Marcos is lying through his teeth? Do they believe that National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) Melvin Matibag, appointed from nowhere just four months ago, woke up one day, was told of an ICC warrant by another nobody, Antonio Trillanes IV, and decided to arrest a senator voted into office by 20 million Filipinos, even ordering his men to invade the Senate to do so?
In layman’s terms, the court is saying the Senate had shielded him from arrest by the NBI; the ICC warrant has not been implemented; and the highest level of the executive branch, represented by president, did not issue any instructions to arrest him.
So, there’s nothing to issue a restraining order against, the Supreme Court is saying.
Absurdity
The absurdity of the ruling can also be summarized this way: The court practically said it cannot stop Dela Rosa’s arrest because he has not yet been arrested. That is akin to a court refusing to stop an execution because the prisoner is still alive.
The Supreme Court thinking reminds of the shocking statement years ago of two ranking officials in Aquino III’s Cabinet and party — Manuel Roxas and Joseph Emilio Abaya — in reply to people’s outrage over their sufferings as a result of government’s gross inefficiency, “Buhay pa naman kayo, ‘di ba? (You’re still alive, aren’t you?).” In Bato’s case, the court is in effect saying: “You’re still not in jail, aren’t you?”
The court explained: “A TRO is issued only if the matter is of such extreme urgency that grave injustice and irreparable injury will arise unless it is issued immediately. Senator Dela Rosa has the burden of proof to show that there is a meritorious ground for the issuance of a TRO in his favor. This, he failed to do.”
Maybe Bato’s lawyers failed. But have the Supreme Court members been so cooped up in their chambers that they do not read newspapers nor watch broadcast news?
Bato is the second Filipino against whom the ICC has issued a warrant. The first was on former president Rodrigo Duterte. Marcos ordered the chief of the Philippine National Police’s Crime Investigation and Detection Group to head a team to arrest him. Duterte was forcibly put on a plane and surrendered to the ICC, which threw him in jail, where he will spend at least eight years of his life — the shortest period of the ICC’s trials.
Technicality
Bato was asking the court to issue a TRO to stop the Marcos government from similarly doing what it did to Duterte. But the court reverted to the technicality, an absurd one really that there is no arrest warrant against him, issued by a local court, and therefore nothing to issue a TRO on. Amazing.
The court ruling, which paves the way for Bato’s arrest and even his death — the NBI’s Matibag claimed he has become “armed and dangerous” — ignored the most obvious fact in this controversy: Once Dela Rosa is arrested by the NBI or any Philippine agency acting on behalf of the ICC, he will be whisked off to The Hague within hours — beyond the reach of Philippine courts, Philippine law and Philippine sovereignty.
TROs are meant to prevent irreversible injury while courts decide unresolved legal and constitutional controversies. Otherwise, constitutional adjudication becomes meaningless theater performed after the damage has already been done.
The majority appears incapable of grasping that constitutional injuries can become irreversible.
Justice Antonio Kho’s dissent flatly states that on May 11, 2026, armed NBI agents actually attempted to arrest Dela Rosa within Senate premises. Yet the majority still portrayed the threat as speculative.
What exactly were the NBI agents doing there? Conducting tourism around the Senate building?
Senate
The court also argued that because Dela Rosa managed to leave the Senate premises and remained physically mobile, there was no substantial invasion of his liberty.
This reasoning is almost comical. By that logic, a fugitive evading arrest cannot complain about imminent arrest because he has not yet been captured.
Justice Amy Lazaro-Javier’s dissent delivered a subtle but devastating rebuke to the majority’s apparent surrender to political atmosphere and media hysteria. She warned that constitutional adjudication must not be infected by “extraneous considerations” or public passions.
That warning was necessary because the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) itself practically transformed its comment asking the court to dismiss Bato’s plea into a political manifesto.
Justice Kho reproduced astonishing passages from the OSG’s filing portraying Dela Rosa as morally undeserving of constitutional protection because of his involvement with Duterte’s drug war.
The OSG as well as Justices Marvic Leonen and Alberto Caguioa — former officials of the late president Aquino III government — said that Dela Rosa had once stood “protected from accountability,” that thousands allegedly died in the war against drugs, that extending constitutional protections to him would “deepen the wounds already borne by those left behind.” These two justices as well as two others who concurred with the majority decision have already decided on Bato’s guilt.
Propaganda
That is not constitutional analysis. That is political propaganda as well as ideologically based rants, no better than the slogans shouted in the Left’s street demonstrations.
The issue before the court was not whether Dela Rosa was morally admirable, nor even responsible for extrajudicial killings during Duterte’s war on drugs. The issue was whether the Philippine executive may arrest and surrender a Filipino citizen to a foreign tribunal without a Philippine judicial warrant and without clear statutory procedures.
Justice Ricardo Rosario’s dissent struck directly at this point: “An ICC warrant of arrest, even if properly issued according to ICC rules, has no self-executing force within Philippine territory.”
He further stressed: “Philippine law enforcement cannot execute it without complying with domestic legal protocols, such as securing a valid court order from a local judge.”
This is elementary constitutionalism. A foreign warrant does not magically become a Philippine judicial order simply because Malacañang wishes to cooperate.
Sovereignty
Rosario also raised the central sovereignty issue the majority sidestepped: “Any warrant issued after our withdrawal from the Rome Statute should be considered an infringement on Philippine sovereignty.”
Equally devastating was Justice Kho’s warning: “If the OSG’s theory is accepted, any international request could become an enforceable domestic arrest order simply because the executive chooses to honor it. That would reduce the Bill of Rights to a matter of executive sufferance, rather than a binding limitation on governmental power.”
However, a reason for hope that the Supreme Court hasn’t come to the rescue of Marcos Jr. the way it legitimized his father’s martial law in 1972, is the fact that its final ruling on this entire issue, according to the decision itself, will depend on its determination of the following:
“1) the enforceability of the ICC’s warrant of arrest after the Philippines’ withdrawal from the Rome Statute; 2) the need for prior judicial authorization before the implementation of the ICC warrant; 3) the president’s power and/or authority to recognize and/or enforce the ICC warrant; 4) the meaning of Section 17 of Republic Act 9851; 5) the rules governing “surrender” under the said provision; and 6) the application of the fugitive disentitlement doctrine.”
No one among the justices — whether concurring or dissenting in the majority opinion — had outrightly claimed that the Supreme Court should affirm the constitutionality of the ICC warrant.
This Supreme Court decision could be its way of portraying itself to the public that it isn’t favoring Bato and by extension Duterte, but preparing an Earth-shaking ruling that the ICC warrant is unconstitutional and that the former president’s kidnapping by the Marcos regime and surrender to the ICC was illegal. Now that could be a fatal blow to Marcos’ rule.
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
The post SC’s absurd response to Bato: ‘You’re still free, aren’t you?’ first appeared on Rigoberto Tiglao.
SC’s absurd response to Bato: ‘You’re still free, aren’t you?’
Source: Breaking News PH
No comments: