Vice President Maria Leonor “Leni” Robredo slammed the arrest of the three attorneys who were monitoring a police search in a bar in Makati City last week.
For Robredo, the arrest of three lawyers — Jan Vincent Soliven, Lenie Rocel Rocha, and Romulo Bernard Alarcon — is “an issue that concerns not just the legal community but every Filipino.”
“Some members of our police force now feel that they can brush aside claims to legal rights and due process, and bully and intimidate those asserting them — even if they are lawyers performing their duties, and thus, clothed with authority as officers of the court — through verbal harangues, physical restraint, and the threat of subsequent criminal liability, is indicative of an alarming erosion of Constitutional protections and the rule of law,” the Vice President said on Monday, August 20.
Robredo also said if lawyers, like herself, who are fully educated on their Constitutional rights and trained to assert them “can be treated with such official disdain,” what more could happen when “less informed and less empowered Filipinos” are “subjected to abusive behavior by agents of government.”
It was on August 16 when Makati City police detained Soliven, Rocha, and Alarcon for allegedly committing “obstruction of justice” for monitoring their search at the Time in Manila bar in Makati City.
The police claimed that the three lawyers entered the premises of the bar during the inspection, took photos and videos of the scene, and “intimidated the members of the searching team without proper and prior coordination.”
But Desierto & Desierto law firm, which represents one of the owners of the raided bar, said their attorneys were just doing their jobs in accordance to their client’s request to send lawyers to monitor and watch the authorities as they were conducting the search.
The lawyers were released a day after their arrest.
Robredo said a citizen’s legal and Constitutional rights, whether asserted directly or through lawyers, “can be invoked at any time, in any venue, and not just in court as the statements of several PNP (Philippine National Police) officials would seem to imply.”
“The PNP’s apparent contention that the accountability of law enforcers to rules and proper procedure cannot be raised in the course of police operations, but only in legal proceedings arising after the fact, is a dangerous mindset that dramatically increases the likelihood of abuse and the assurance of impunity,” Robredo stressed.
She added that the Bill of Rights under the 1987 Constitution serves as a “constant shield” not only for lawyers and courts but for everyone against “official abuse.”
The Vice President then urged members of the Philippine Bar to “continue condemning” the arrest of the three lawyers and “stand firmly” for the observance of the Bill of Rights and the rule of law.
Likewise, she called on the public to express their concern, alarm, and outrage so that everyone will know that “free Filipinos will not let even the slightest relapse into tyranny pass unchallenged.”
Aside from Robredo, Opposition Senator Leila de Lima and Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon, who are also lawyers, denounced the arrest, with de Lima saying that attorneys are now the ‘target’ of the government’s war on drugs and Drilon describing the issue as a “blatant display of disrespect against our entire justice system.”