MANILA – President Rodrigo Duterte’s order to have Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV arrested can be a ground for impeachment.
It could constitute a culpable violation of the Constitution, former Ateneo School of Government dean Tony La Viña said in a television interview on Thursday.
“How can the President order the arrest? Only former president Ferdinand Marcos had that power through the Presidential Detention Act,” La Viña told cable news channel ANC.
Duterte proclaimed that the amnesty that former president Benigno Aquino III granted Trillanes was “void ab initio.”
He ordered the Department of Justice and the Armed Forces’ court martial to “pursue all criminal and administrative charges and to employ all lawful means to apprehend Trillanes.”
That Trillanes’ amnesty application has gone missing does not automatically mean that the senator did not meet the amnesty requirements, La Viña said.
“If you cannot find your birth certificate in NSO (National Statistics Office, now Philippine Statistics Authority), does that mean you were never born? It just means that the document cannot be found but you cannot say [someone] is no longer a Filipino because his birth certificate cannot be found,” he said.
“If I cannot find my marriage certificate, if the NSO cannot certify that I was married in Quezon City on May blank 1985, does that mean I can now remarry someone else?” he added.
La Viña also said Duterte’s forfeiture of Trillanes’ amnesty defeats its purpose of being an “important tool for national unity and healing” that has been given to scores of rebels.
“If I were the lawyer, for example, of a rebel group, I would say do not believe the amnesty of a President because it can be revoked anytime,” La Viña said.
“It’s a very big disservice to the country to do this. This is way beyond Senator Trillanes … This is your ultimate healing instrument and now you destroy it. You destroy it to hit a critic. How distorted is that thinking?” he said./PN
