Leila: VP ‘undermining’ Marcos on ICC stance

De Lima said: “First, while purporting to champion the position of PBBM as chief architect of the nation’s foreign policy, VP Sara is actually undermining this presidential prerogative when she said that she intends to submit her own legal position on the matter to the DOJ.” The justice department has received Duterte’s letter opposing the possible rejoining of the country with the ICC.

On the submission of a legal opinion, de Lima said: “… as a member of the Cabinet, VP Sara has no business submitting such legal opinion in her capacity as Education Secretary. The ICC matter has nothing to do with the Department of Education.” “Second, if she is submitting her legal opinion in her capacity as VP, then she is accomplishing precisely the very opposite of her admonition that we should respect the President’s position, bypreempting the finality of said position even when she has no authority to do so,” de Lima also argued.

“In her capacity as VP, she is not a member of the Cabinet, and therefore has no role whatsoever in shaping foreign policy at the Cabinet level,” she added.

She added that the Philippine government should not put too much weight on the counsel of former President Rodrigo Duterte and his daughter, VP Duterte, when it comes to the issue of cooperating with the ICC, which intends to investigate the former president’s bloody drug war that claimed thousands of Filipino lives.

Mr. Marcos has expressed openness on the possibility of the Philippines rejoining the ICC, which was established under the Rome Statute and ratified by the Philippine Senate in 2011.

“All told, the Dutertes of Davao are not the best resource persons for the administration in deciding whether or not to cooperate in the ICC investigation, considering that they are the ones being investigated for their role in the operation of a death squad in Davao City during the period within the scope of said investigation,” de Lima, who feuded with then Davao City mayor Rodrigo Duterte over the killings in the city when she was the chairman of the Commission on Human Rights.

De Lima also said that by submitting an opinion to the DOJ on the ICC matter, “VP Sara is putting the DOJ in an awkward position.”

“The Justice Secretary does not answer to the VP, but by giving the DOJ a piece of her mind, Secretary Boying Remulla is hard put to ignore her submission, even if this is legally untenable or inconsistent with the administration’s own position, by virtue of the formal rank of the VP even if she has no official capacity to help render legal opinions on foreign policy,” the former senator said.

Also one of the reasons VP Sara is not an objective source of counsel is the fact that she is a potential subject of investigation by the ICC herself, de Lima said.

“She is a potential subject of the ICC probe, if not already among those being investigated by the ICC in her role as Mayor of Davao from 2010 and within the coverage of the jurisdiction of the ICC over the Philippines while the latter was still a member state to the Rome Statute,” she noted.

“The ICC investigation does not only cover the drug war extra-jucidial killings from 2016, but all the way back to 2011 when the Philippines ratified the Rome Statute, during which time VP Sara was Mayor of Davao and thus has to answer for the prevalence of EJKs in her city within the scope of the ICC investigation. — Maricel Cruz