PUBLIC awareness is Justice Antonio Carpio’s foremost challenge should he throw his hat in the political arena.
A week ago, no one would have objected had we said most Filipinos are unaware of his existence. In recent surveys for President Carpio barely managed to get one percent of the nods of those who responded.
The reason, precisely, is that Carpio has never been a politician. Not once has he presented his credentials for public scrutiny in seeking elective office.
Carpio has been with the judiciary for the longest time. Judges and Justices are hardly recognizable outside their stations. The simple reason is that they are not covered by the media except in a few sensational cases. Members of the judiciary are better read in their decisions than seen pandering to the crowd.
A judge cannot be a politician who writes decisions in order to please the most number of people. He is in office to serve the ends of justice no matter how painful.
This was Carpio’s serious handicap. Also, few people think the West Philippine Sea is a sexy enough issue by which to hoist a political career. A politician thinks of how the voter can be cajoled with petty favors, not how they can help protect Scarborough.
There is little expertise even among lawyers in this area. Not many people have made public international law their cup of tea.
Boy, have we been wrong. The moment President Rodrigo Duterte opened his mouth to challenge Justice Carpio to a debate on the West Philippine Sea the latter’s viability as a candidate skyrocketed to the stratosphere.
Duterte withdrew from the debate with his tail between his legs. Carpio was instantly catapulted to a level of trust never before reached in his lonely campaign for territorial integrity. It was a nifty shellacking without a single punch having been thrown from either side.
The President opened his mouth too soon. He spoke without filter. The moment the challenge left his mouth he knew he made a mistake. He knows that the nine-dash line is a barefaced lie that is easily debunked by the law of the sea.
There is a saying among lawyers: if the facts of a case are in your favor, hammer on the facts. If the law is in your favor, hammer on the law. If both the facts and the law do not favor your cause, hammer on the Constitution.
In this case, the facts, the law, and the Constitution do not favor Duterte’s defeatist position. He knows this and thus took the same tack taken by the Chinese – lose by default.
Yes, there is a reason why the Chinese ignored the summons of the arbitral tribunal – the facts and the law do not favor its nine-dash line. The tribunal can never sustain their position as the nine-dash line has been exposed as a massive invention designed to take territories way beyond China’s exclusive economic zone.
Since winning in the legal arena is impossible, China did what it does best – work from within the enemy.
Thus, even if we believe Duterte’s pronouncement that it was Pnoy who dropped the ball by withdrawing from Scarborough, there is no doubting that it was China’s machinations that transplanted the fight from the legal front to the old mantra of “might is right” – the same undemocratic solution sought to be remedied by the UNCLOS. Xi Jinping has not said anything in public. He does not have to because it is President Duterte who loves repeating this continuing threat of war.
This helps explain Duterte’s contrasting position from his cabinet men Locsin and Lorenzana. While these secretaries have dug in to protect the West Philippine Sea, the President has chosen to hang on to some emotional attachments to China, like a college in Fujian having been cunningly named after his beloved mother Soledad.
Unfortunately for the country, it is Duterte’s sound bites that matter more. And he cannot stand Carpio calling him out on this deception./PN
