Two bits of good news lighten up the start of 2025

In the fourth quarter of 2024, about 63 percent of Filipino families (17.4 million families) considered themselves poor. This was the highest percentage since November 2003 – or more than 20 years ago – when 59 percent or 16.3 million families said the same.

The data comes from the latest Social Weather Stations survey conducted nationwide, from Dec. 12 to 18. For the residents in Mindanao, a much higher 76 percent deemed themselves poor.

Surely, the increasing number of self-declared poor among our people is a cause for national concern. The government’s poverty-reduction program definitely needs serious evaluation, what with the contributory negative causes such as calamities, both natural and man-made, that come aplenty every year.

This negative trend notwithstanding, two positive developments at the beginning of the new year provide us reasons to cheer up.

First is a recent Supreme Court ruling, penned by the prolific writer of lengthy, pithy decisions, Senior Associate Justice Marvic Leonen, which set the bar for the issuance of search warrants by the country’s courts at all levels.

The ruling stresses that search warrants must particularly describe the place to be searched. Otherwise, it warns, the search warrant is deemed as a general warrant, which the Constitution prohibits.

General warrants provide the raiding police teams unlimited power to decide where to search and who or what to seize, which violates the guaranteed right to be secure in one’s person, home and belongings.

The human rights alliance Karapatan welcomed the ruling. Its secretary general, Cristina Palabay, deems the ruling “especially significant” since State forces, including “unscrupulous judges, have been known to routinely violate this right by issuing and serving search warrants against activists targeted for persecution.”

Palabay cited two cases of such defective search warrants.

• On March 7, 2022, police searched the house of peasant activist Erlindo “Lino” Baez, using a search warrant that simply designated the place to be searched as “Barangay San Vicente, Sto. Tomas, Batangas.”

Manila RTC Branch174 Judge Jason Zapanta, who issued the warrant, also did not ask probing questions to the police officers who applied for the warrant.

• On Nov. 5, 2019, the police executed a defective search warrant against the Bayan-Manila Office in Tondo, issued by Quezon City RTC Branch 84 Judge Cecilyn Burgos-Villavert. The warrant was intended for Brgy 183, but the police instead searched Brgy 178. Persons who were not named in the warrant were searched, including Reina Mae Nasino, who was taken into police custody.

Fortunately, the judges to whose court the two cases had been assigned voided the search warrants after scanning them. Consequently, the cases were dismissed.

Applauding Justice Leonen’s ruling, Kapatid, an association of families and friends of political detainees, declared that it “offers a ray of hope for political prisoners unjustly jailed under questionable search warrants and their irregular execution,” said Fides Lim, Kapatid spokesperson and wife of political prisoner Vicente Ladlad, a peace consultant for the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP).

When Ladlad was arrested in 2018 in an apartment in Novaliches, Quezon City, he was shown a “faulty and vague” arrest warrant, and high-powered firearms and explosives were planted by the arresting state security forces to ensure that Ladlad could not avail of bail, Lim asserted.

“This ruling… brings us hope that political prisoners whose cases have been tainted by flawed procedures can now receive justice, and that government forces, including judges responsible for the issuance of and abuse of search warrants, will be held accountable,” the Kapatid spokesperson concluded.

From the Supreme Court website, we learned that Justice Leonen’s ruling acquitted Lucky Enriquez of the crime of illegal possession of dangerous drugs and drug paraphernalia under RA 9165, due to a defective search warrant and its irregular execution against him.

We are further informed – and reminded – that:

• In implementing the search warrant, under Rule 126, Section 7 of the Rules of Court, government agents must first identify themselves and ask for permission to enter the place they want to search.

• They can only force their way in if they are denied entry. This rule protects both the person being served with the search warrant and the state agents from possible violence that could happen from an unannounced entry.

• Searches must be made with the lawful occupants of the house as witnesses or, if they are unavailable, two residents in the same area must witness the search.

• In the case cited, Enriquez was the lawful occupant of the house but he was not able to witness the search.

• The address in the search warrant stated the address of the place to be searched simply as “Informal Settler’s Compound, NIA Road, Barangay Pinyahan, QC.”

• PDEA agents, guided by an informant, entered the house occupied by Enriquez. Without knocking or announcing their presence, they entered through an open door, apprehended Enriquez and seized sachets containing shabu.

• The Regional Trial Court convicted Enriquez and the Court of Appeals subsequently upheld the conviction. The Supreme Court, however, reversed the ruling, declaring the search warrant invalid.

The second piece of positive news is the significant boost to the case against former president Rodrigo Duterte before the International Criminal Court (ICC), for probable crime against humanity in the conduct of his “war on drugs.”

ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan has succeeded in his efforts to get into his protective custody two key witnesses from Davao City: Arturo Lascañas and Edgar Matobato. Both are self-confessed members of the so-called Davao Death Squad (DDS). They acted as hitmen in Duterte’s two-decade “war on drugs” when he was Davao City’s longest-serving mayor.

Matobato managed to leave the Philippines in the second quarter of 2024, aided by the ICC prosecutor. Lascañas had legally left the country many years earlier.

What if human rights defenders and concerned citizens had not pressed loudly and militantly to point out the wrongs committed by authorities principally tasked to safeguard our rights?