Bernas: Peoples initiative tool for amending, not revising the Constitution.

[mosimos]

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"Parang binabastos ng Presidente ang Supreme Court nyan when the Supreme Court said 'no' and the President said 'go ahead' (It seems the President is insulting the Supreme Court)," Fr. Joaquin Bernas, one of the framers of the 1987 Constitution, said during a forum on the Charter held in Cebu City.

Bernas said Ms Arroyo's action could not be described any other way as she knew full well that the Supreme Court had already ruled in 1997 that an enabling law was needed to amend the Charter through a people's initiative.

Bernas spoke a day after the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines voiced alarm over the Palace-backed signature campaign to support the shift from a presidential to a parliamentary form of government. The shift would allow Ms Arroyo to rule as president and prime minister until at least 2010.

Bernas spoke before some 200 people from the academe, non-government organizations, lawyers' groups and the Church.

Asked whether the high court would allow such an affront from the President, Bernas said the people would find out once the court ruled on the petition from the Abakada party-list group urging it to revisit its 1997 ruling.

He said that for a people's initiative to be constitutional, Congress must pass a law that prescribes the form, not the substance, of the exercise, and designate the date and venue and the manner of supervising such an initiative.

Amend, not revise

Bernas said the ongoing exercise was unconstitutional "because it calls for a change of structure of the government from presidential to parliamentary and that is revision."

Under the Constitution, a people's initiative is a tool for amending provisions of the Charter and not for revising it, he said.

Bernas also said the move to amend the Constitution now was not as urgent as Malaca¤ang wanted the public to believe.

When asked if Ms Arroyo violated the Constitution by endorsing the people's initiative, Bernas said she might have her own interpretation of the law that should be strongly argued in a proper forum.

The CBCP pastoral letter said the people's initiative was "dangerously unclear and open to manipulation by groups with self-serving interests."

Its nice to hear that legal luminaries have presented this legal arguments against this Cha cha train of Arroyo.

[mannyamador]

Fr. Bernas is right. GMA is misusing the "people's initiative" just to keep herself in power.

No to illegal "people's intiative"!

[FK]

They will makes things illegal to legal... and legal to illegal. And claims it's the rule of law, and when the rule of law says otherwise they claim it's the rule of the majority.