Factly speaking
Oops. Talk about premature judgment. Here I was yakking last week about how the Supreme Court should be open about the Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth (SALN) of its justices, and it turns out it has been. Comes from trusting the news too much.
Apparently, over the relatively brief tenure of this new Court presided by Chief Justice Sereno, SALNs have indeed been shared with various members of civic society, people responsible or nosy or scholarly enough to actually ask for them. The complete list is supposed to have been compiled and then released. Issue nipped in the bud. Potential clash between branches of government defused. Constitutional crisis evaporates.
So, I wonder why the President issued his blistering statement about the coy refusal of the judiciary to share these SALNs. Maybe he was fed with the wrong information? Off with the offender's head!
That leaves me red faced as well for having pontificated on how perhaps our justices should consider making public their SALNs, because they are ultimately public servants. Now I am ultimately humiliated by Teddy Te's revelation.
Serves me right for not fact checking. Such is the life of the casual observer, judging on the basis of Presidential statements. So now that's solved. We should be grateful that this court has chosen to be open about the relative wealth of its members, and now that it has a newly appointed member in the person of Solicitor General Jardeleza, the press will have a field day with his SALN. Or maybe not, if Jardeleza was diligently filing his own SALNs in his capacity as Solicitor General.
In any case, back to fact accuracy. Now, more than ever, we see it as a duty of every one, not just the press or the President's speechwriters, to get their facts straight. With the speed with which rumors can spread and evoke reaction, the degree of damage caused by unfounded stories can be exponential.
I remember when news of Rihanna's premature death littered my news feed. False. Or the identities of those actresses in Paolo Bediones' scandalous videos. Not the right ones, apparently. Meanwhile, reputations were shot. My emotions uselessly stirred up (Rihanna's story, not Bediones'). And the damage was done.
It is probably with this framework that we should view the controversy surrounding Jardeleza's original exclusion from the shortlist of nominees to the Supreme Court. What really happened inside the chambers of the Judicial and Bar Council? Was the Solicitor General really blackballed by the Chief Justice? Was the reason behind his exclusion one of ethics? Was it because of our territorial claims versus China? Was the deletion of a vital argument in our legal brief versus China's claims one of a "mere" miscalculation in strategy, or a more malevolent machination by Chinese agents?
Some of these have been reported by the press so many times over that they've already become accepted truth. But I haven't seen Chief Justice Sereno confirm that she indeed blackballed Jardeleza on the basis of these Chinese territorial claims and his supposed lack of fidelity to the nation's interests. Instead, I see her photo, wreathed in a smile while congratulating him on the occasion of his fast-tracked swearing-in as a newest member of the Supreme Court.
So now the question is, what is the real story? Will we find out or will this be brushed into the dustbins of useless facts? Should it still be pursued?
Perhaps it should. Otherwise we will have this constant cloud of doubt hovering over the new Justice, one who has had, from the looks of it, an exceptionally illustrious career over the years. And this is perhaps what drove him to try to clear his name by asking to be given due process when he alleged his side was not heard, and he was not given an opportunity to clear his name before the nominations committee.
Well, his future as a Justice is right ahead. He has been zipped into his post without even having to be heard. Perhaps, while the real facts may be moot for purposes of his getting into the short list, they may still be vital for his future decisions to be imbued with legitimacy. After all, decisions are lent gravitas not just because of the institution that rendered them, but also because of the ponente. It behooves him, as one who has sought the protection of due process, to give us our own due process.
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