Jailhouse lawyers all

‘She will likely be at it until noon of June 30, 2010. Vigilance should not be lowered until after then.’

The same advice should also apply to Interior Secretary Ronnie Puno who is pressing for the early setting up a barangay registry listing each and every resident in the community. We take Puno’s word that a barangay registry is provided for by law. But a registry is just that, a list. It should not be used as a pretext to install a national ID system without congressional action as the Supreme Court ruled in 1998.

The problem is that officials act more like jailhouse lawyers than executors of the law. The Supreme Court has spoken. The citizens could not be pressured, in the absence of a law, to provide information that would violate their privacy under the pretext of improving delivery of government services. Isn’t this clear enough?

Had Gloria Arroyo enough respect for the spirit of the Supreme Court ruling, which is to safeguard fundamental rights from government abuses, she should not even have entertained the issuance of a 2002 order which sought to consolidate the ID systems adopted by different government agencies.

While Supreme Court upheld the legality of the one-government ID system in 2004, it was on the basis of the repeated assurance of government lawyers that the new scheme was not aimed at and would not be used to violate the right to privacy.

Those who questioned the Arroyo order had argued that it was a surreptitious attempt to go around the 1998 ruling. The Supreme Court, however, gave more weight to the government’s claim the critics were seeing ghosts of human rights violations where there were none.

Since 2004, the fears of the worst critics of the administration have time and again been confirmed. Arroyo would brook no opposition to her rule even at the price of trampling on the Bill of Rights and of upsetting the check and balance among the three branches of government.

Gloria is entering the twilight of her rule. Instead of resigning herself to the inevitable in a democracy, she is even at this moment hatching schemes to stay in power.