Politician’s bogus death

APUBLIC official is identified in social media as having been embroiled in the following circumstances:

When he was younger, this man wed a woman who got pregnant in the course of their union.

While the woman was heavy with child, the man disappeared into thin air and could not be located. When asked, the man’s employer replied that the man was kidnapped after being forced into a white van.

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The woman gave birth to a daughter. Years passed without the man ever reappearing. The woman provided for the child without the help of the disappearing husband.

In the meantime, she met another man and fell in love with him.

They decided to get married but the woman was still legally married to the father of her daughter.

She filed a court petition seeking a judicial declaration of her husband’s “presumptive death.”

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The Family Code provides that a marriage contracted while another one is subsisting is a void marriage.

One exception is the case where one spouse had been absent for at least four consecutive years and the spouse present believes with basis that the absent spouse is already dead.

The present spouse, if she wants to remarry, can file a petition for the declaration of presumptive death of the absentee spouse. The decision granting the petition is executory, to immediately pave the way for the subsequent marriage, which is a valid marriage in the eyes of the law.

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What happens if the absent spouse surfaces after the court declares that he is dead and his wife has actually remarried?

This allegedly happened to the politician in question. His daughter, now an adult, narrates that she was in her teens when she discovered that her father is not dead. She saw him on television more than a decade after his disappearing act.

The law provides that the second marriage is automatically terminated upon the filing of an affidavit of reappearance of the absent spouse.

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Note that it is the reappearing spouse who has the duty of signing and filing the affidavit to resume the marital union. There is no better witness to his “resurrection” than himself.

In one case, the Supreme Court said that the Family Code provides the presumptively dead spouse with the remedy of terminating the subsequent marriage by mere reappearance.

There is no indication, at least from the pronouncements of the daughter, that the politician has complied with this duty to file an affidavit of reappearance.

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That the politician in question is alive and kicking might as well be a matter of “judicial notice,” as judges would call assertions that require no further proof.

Obviously, he was able to submit documents necessary for his candidacy and discharge his functions as an elective official.

Whil e “dea d,” he ma rried somebody else and sired other children. Is that subsequent marriage valid, and are the children born in that context legitimate?

If he is guilty of illegal omissions, does that affect his right to hold public office? Interesting questions to answer in the future./