Can Erap run for president again? SC mum

MANILA, Philippines - Can Manila Mayor Joseph Estrada run for president again in 2016?

The Supreme Court (SC) has yet to answer this question even as it upheld his election into office in 2013 despite a plunder conviction in 2007 that disqualified him from holding public office.

SC spokesman Theodore Te said the high court’s ruling last week pertained only to the disqualification case of Estrada as Manila mayor.

“The decision resolved only the issue involving the qualification of the former president in the 2013 election. His eligibility for the 2016 presidential election is another matter,” Te said in an interview over the weekend.

The SC has not released the official copy of its Jan. 21 decision dismissing the disqualification case against Estrada filed by his rival former mayor Alfredo Lim and lawyer Alicia Risos-Vidal.

He noted that the issue had been raised before the high tribunal when Estrada ran for president in the 2010 polls.

“But the SC did not resolve the issue and decided to dismiss the petition for being moot since Estrada did not win anyway,” he explained.

In a seven-page unanimous resolution penned by former chief justice Renato Corona in August 2010, the high court dismissed the petition of lawyer Evillo Pormento on the ground that Estrada lost in the election.

The SC held that “any discussion of his reelection would simply be hypothetical and speculative and would serve no useful or practical purpose.” 

It ruled that the defeat of Estrada to President Aquino was a “subsequent event that had overtaken the legal issue on his qualification.”

The high tribunal also opted to exercise “judicial restraint” in resolving the issue of whether or not the ousted leader was covered by the ban on the reelection of a president under Article VII, Section 4 of the Constitution.