My response to Homobono Adaza’s column on Grace Poe’s citizenship

my response to bono adaza’s column on poe’s citizenehsip

December 17, 2015 at 8:17 am
Bono has been a long time ally in many legal battles against the corrupt Establishment, long with the late Atty. Alan Paguia and others, but in Poe’s case we believe Bono clearly diverges from the Law.
I was born in the Philippines while my parents were in the process of naturalizing their citizen, according to mainstream low interpretation I became thus a “natural born” citizen by virtue of that process although a few like Sen. Miriam Santiago argued that a case cn be made of my status as “natural born”. This became an issue when I ran for the Senate as the only co-candidate of Miriam in the 1995 senatorial elections – the Comelec chiarman then whom I mercilessly lampooned in the columns after the 1995 elections due to the blatant dagdag-bawas of that election filed five cases against me for alleged falsifying my citizenship status and eventually got me in jail for five days (but that’s another long story).

In defending Poe’s claim that she is a natural born Filipino Bono raises the point of “legal fiction” versus “an “issue of fact”; that is, of being born in the Philippines. I believe there is definition of legal fiction that is being used too loosely here, and the thought process that allowed Bono to conclude this is the legal fiction itself. All laws may be said to be “fiction”, that is, human invention; but laws once invented, established in a community or society or State, becomes the accepted “fact” with structure and physical consequences – facts that emanate from words written as laws.

The Philippines has a Constitution, I dislike it it in most aspect but it had the physical consequence of putting me in jail for five days on account of my challenge to a particular provision of the Constitution. But there is room for interpretation still there. I argued using a part of that provision that I also “did not have to perform any act to perfect” my Filipino citizenship (my parents did it for me, should I be responsible for that?)

In Poe’s case she cannot even establish that she is born of any Filipino parent, and worse she later renounced what regular citizenship she acquired by just being born in the Philippines – that is, her naturalized status – when she became an American citizen consciously and willingly, and maybe wholeheartedly, and then again “performed an act” to reacquire a Filipino citizenship for herself – clearly intending to joni politics and use whatever political capital gained from have a popular adoptive father who died and created a massive outpouring of sympathy (by the way I campaigned for FPJ wholeheartedly).

Poe’s lawyers and the other like Saguisag, Panganiban, et al, are creating fictitious ideas about the international conventions on th issue of “foundlings”, about the “right of the people to decide” the issue regardless of what the Law that 100 million ohter people are expected follow says. Since that 995 controversy over my citizenship I decided never to run again but continue the course of serving public interest without political position… In 2007 President Estrada while in detention offered me a senate slot in an election year that would have given me all the chances to win. I declined and suggested Trillanes to be given that slot. I don’t regret it, I serve the nation bettr than most ofhte legislators in Congress and the Seante as a militant citizen. Poe should do the same and after some years skepticism over her motives may change and she’ll be respected as a Filipino citizen then – natural born or not.

But to end this in a light note, I asked Teddy Boy Locsion what he thought of Poe’s citizneship status and he said, “Of course she is natural born, any one that comes outof the womb of a mother is natural born” Certainly, not Ceasarian. Chow.