Initiating complaints

However, Neri Javier Colmenares – who is one of the counsels for those who filed the People’s Impeachment Complaint – took issue with Adaza’s arguments. “It is correct that only one complaint may be initiated (against the same official) within a year, but the issue is, when is a complaint initiated?” Colmenares told Bulatlat in an interview.

“The Constitution says only the House can initiate a complaint,” Colmenares said. “The House is the sole authority to initiate a complaint.”

Art. XI, Sec. 3 (1) of the Constitution provides that: “The House of Representatives shall have the exclusive power to initiate all cases of impeachment.”

“When does the House act as an institution?” Colmenares said. “Is it when somebody files a complaint? Of course not, it’s just the complainant filing. Is it when the Speaker refers it to the Justice Committee? Of course not also. Is it when the Justice Committee finds (it sufficient in form and substance)? The correct interpretation is that the House initiates a complaint when it impeaches the President, meaning when they decide – as a House of Representatives – to impeach the President. And when does that happen? When a complaint has the required minimum vote of one-third of the House membership, and that can only happen in the plenary.”

The People’s Impeachment Complaint

Before Arroyo, the Philippine presidents who faced impeachment complaints were Elpidio Quirino, Diosdado Macapagal (Arroyo’s father), Ferdinand Marcos, and Joseph Estrada. The complaints against Quirino, Macapagal, and Marcos all failed to get the minimum required number of votes at the House of Representatives; while the complaint against Estrada was initiated, but was not completed due to maneuvers by the Estrada camp which resulted in what is now known as the People Power II uprising.

Arroyo faced her first impeachment complaint in 2005. This was when the Macapagal-Arroyo administration first used the tactic of preempting the filing of a complaint by having one of its minions, in the person of lawyer Oliver Lozano, file a weak complaint which, in turn, was summarily dismissed by Arroyo’s allies in Congress.

Anticipating that a similar tactic would be used in 2006, anti-Arroyo individuals and groups, who are mostly identified with the “parliament of the streets,” filed a series of complaints to block another effort by the administration to use the same maneuver. Thus, the concept of a People’s Impeachment Complaint was born. It is, as described by militant organizations, an impeachment complaint filed directly by the people for adoption by the Minority in the Lower House. It is a novel concept as it is initiated and followed through by private citizens and is complementary to the “parliament of the streets.”

However, the Arroyo administration once again used its dominance in the Lower House to reject the first People’s Impeachment Complaint. The initiators of the People’s Impeachment Complaint then held a Citizen’s Congress for Truth and Accountability (CCTA) which subsequently found Arroyo guilty of the charges contained in the complaint.

“Strongest, so far”

Colmenares believes that the complaint filed by Guingona and Bayan November 12 is the strongest so far of all impeachment complaints lodged against Arroyo. “The evidence is very strong,” Colmenares said.

The People’s Impeachment Complaint of 2007 cites Arroyo for the following offenses:

· culpable violations of the Constitution, betrayal of public trust and other high crimes by explicitly and implicitly conspiring, directing, abetting, tolerating with impunity as a state policy and rewarding extrajudicial executions, involuntary disappearances, torture, massacre, illegal arrest and arbitrary detention, forced dislocation of communities and other gross and systematic violations of civil and political rights and engaging in a systematic campaign to cover-up or white-wash these crimes by suppressing and obliterating the evidence, blaming the victims, terrorizing, intimidating and physically attacking witnesses, their relatives, lawyers and supporters, and human rights workers;

· culpable violations of the Constitution and graft and corruption, and betrayal of public trust by (i) abetting and/or tolerated the commission of a crime in regard to the anomalous “ZTE National Broadband contract”, (ii) knowingly and willfully obstructing, impeding or delaying the apprehension of suspects and the investigation of criminal cases arising from the same, and (iii) participating and giving support to or approving the ZTE broadband contract despite her knowledge that the same is tainted with graft and corruption;

· bribery, graft and corruption and betrayal of public trust by authorizing, abetting, allowing, and countenancing the distribution of bribe money to members of Congress in exchange for the hasty referral of the Pulido complaint to the Justice Committee in an attempt to prevent the filing of a more substantive and genuine impeachment complaint and eventually dismissing the Pulido complaint;

· culpable violations of the Constitution and betrayal of public trust by abusing her authority to suppress lawful exercise of the people’s rights to free speech, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, the freedom of the press and the people’s right to information and curtailing the legislative power to inquire on matters relating to the said electoral fraud committed in the 2004 presidential elections and other matters affecting the legitimacy of her presidency; and

· graft and corruption, by entering into illegal government contracts and “criminally” concealing her conjugal assets.

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