Gov’t-hired lawyer for 3 Filipinos awaits China approval for visit

Department of Foreign Affairs (Photo By JDipterocarpus/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

By Joyce Ann L. Rocamora, Philippine News Agency

MANILA – A local lawyer, hired to represent the three Filipinos detained in China over alleged espionage, is awaiting approval to visit, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) said Tuesday.

DFA Undersecretary Eduardo Jose De Vega said the Philippine government will not comment further on the case but assured the families that the government is providing all the necessary legal assistance to the three, including funding for the legal counsel.

“There’s a local lawyer taking on their case funded by the DFA Legal Assistance Fund and we’re strongly requesting the Chinese authorities at least to allow (the lawyer) to see them in their detention in Hainan,” he said in an interview.

De Vega recognized that the Chinese justice system is strict and that the approval of the provincial governor in Hainan is needed.

“So we’re working on that. For more details, we can get it from what the Office of the President and what the NSC (National Security Council) has said — we deny that there was espionage,” he said.

The three arrested Filipinos are former recipients of the Hainan Government Scholarship Program established under the sisterhood agreement between the provinces of Hainan and Palawan, which provided scholarships to 50 scholars from Palawan at the Hainan National University.

At that time, the NSC said they went to China only to study at the invitation of the Chinese government.

NSC Assistant Director General Jonathan Malaya previously said the three are ordinary Filipino citizens with no military training.