THE Supreme Court on Monday continued with its oral arguments on the 37 petitions seeking to declare unconstitutional the provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) of 2020.
During his interpellation, Chief Justice Diosdado Peralta cast doubts on the claim of the petitioners that the definition of terrorism under Section 4 is vague, thus, violative of the people’s constitutional rights such as speech and expression.
Peralta also raised the necessity of amending Article 125 of the Revised Penal Code, which gives arresting officers a maximum of 36 hours to file a case against a person arrested and being detained without an arrest warrant.
The petitioners in the ATA case are questioning the constitutionality of Section 25 of the law, among other provisions, for allowing detention of a suspected terrorist without a judicial warrant up to 14 days from the time of detention, which may be extended for 10 days.
They argued that Section 4 of the ATA has expanded the definition of terrorism by removing predicate crimes and instead listed five offenses with vague wordings such as “acts intended to cause extensive interference with critical infrastructure.”
The petitioners maintained that this would make it easy for the government to penalize any form of dissent, putting activists at most risk.
However, Peralta said there are provisions in existing laws that also punish preparatory acts of crime, such as crime of proposal and conspiracy to commit a crime of treason, a crime of proposal and conspiracy to commit a crime of coup d’etat and crime of conspiracy of sedition.
“All these acts are preparatory acts and these are not new. These have been there since 1932 when the Revised Penal Code was crafted. If the ATA now provides as preparatory acts as crimes, are these provisions now void?” Peralta asked human rights lawyer Jose Manuel Diokno, one of the counsel and petitioners in the case.
Diokno, however, insisted that the ATA “does not employ the terminology preparatory acts,” as it simply says acts intended to, “and that gives us a whole broad possible interpretation.”
As for the longer detention period for persons arrested under the ATA without an arrest warrant, Peralta indicated that such provision might now be necessary since Article 125 of the RPC was introduced as early as 1932.
That year, he added, “probably the population of the country was even less than 1 million. So it was very easy to deliver a person arrested without a warrant within the period of 36 hours, there was no traffic then.”
He also noted that based on experience, cases are filed hastily before the courts because of the restrictive period of 36 hours.
However, Rep. Edcel Lagman, also a counsel-petitioner in the case, insisted that the 36-hour period to detain a person without a warrant remains “a good law,” and is consistent with the country’s undertaking under international conventions that mandates the prompt delivery to a judicial authority of any person taken into custody.
“Protection of fundamental rights should not be capsulized in the time-frame. Such guarantees are immutable and it should be respected under all regimes and under all eras,” Lagman said. However, Peralta maintained that even if there is no 14-day provision under Section 29 of the ATA, Article 125 of the RPC should still be amended because it is already obsolete.
“That has never been amended since 1932, and you can just imagine a person arrested without a warrant, for murder, what are the requirements that should be filed? There is the autopsy, witnesses’ accounts, if there were objects recovered from the scene of the crime they will be referred to examiners…. How can they file the case within 36 hours?” Peralta added.
New plea for TRO
Meanwhile, Lagman sought the Court’s action on the petitioners’ plea for issuance of a temporary restraining order (TRO) to enjoin the implementation of the ATA, citing the arrest of 26-year-old activist Chad Booc, a petitioner in the case.
Booc was arrested on February 15 with five others during a police raid on the retreat house hosting Lumad children at the University of San Carlos in Cebu.
They are accused of training 19 minors in their custody to be “child warriors” for the communist group.
Lagman told the Court that petitioners and their counsels are seriously threatened with prosecution under the ATA. “All this would underscore the chilling effect of the ATA, which cows citizens into silence and are restrained or precluded from exercising their freedom of expression,” Lagman told the Court.
CJ Peralta directed Lagman to put into writing his reiteration of the issuance of the TRO so the Court can direct the Office of the Solicitor General to comment on the motion.
At the end of the oral arguments, Peralta decided to give the OSG 10 days to submit its comment on the plea.