Petitioners to bring Marcos DQ cases to high court
MANILA — Different groups of activists and survivors of the Marcos dictatorship will bring before the Supreme Court their case to disqualify the late dictator’s son and namesake, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., over his 1997 tax offense conviction.
With the former senator seemingly on the verge of clinching the presidency based on partial and unofficial election tally results on Tuesday, the seven-member Commission on Elections (Comelec) sitting as a whole (en banc) dismissed the appeals on four of the five petitions that opposed his candidacy.
All five petitions alleged that Marcos Jr. was perpetually disqualified to hold public office under the National Internal Revenue Code since he was convicted in 1997 for not filing tax returns as Ilocos Norte vice governor and then as governor from 1982 to 1985 during his father’s regime.
the Spratlys chain. It has a threekilometer runway, hangars, radars, missile shelters and weapons systems. It is about 25 kilometers west of Pag-asa (Thitu) Island, the biggest island occupied by the Philippines in the Spratlys and the only one with civilian inhabitants.
China claims the entire South China Sea, including the West Philippine Sea. The Philippines, China, Brunei, Vietnam, Taiwan and Malaysia have overlapping maritime claims in these waters.
An international arbitral tribunal
ruled in 2016 to invalidate Beijing’s historical claims within its so-called nine-dash line. Beijing refuses to accept the ruling.
Simularity’s report is part of its South China Sea Rapid Alert service, which tracks the disputed waters on a daily basis.
In July last year, Simularity reported that Chinese ships anchored in parts of the West Philippines Sea were dumping “raw sewage, every day onto the reefs they are occupying.”
“When the ships don’t move, the poop piles up,” Liz Derr, co-founder and CEO of Simularity, said during a forum hosted by Stratbase ADR Institute on the fifth anniversary
of the Philippines’ 2016 victory against China.
Simularity earlier reported that between May 13 and May 18, 2021, it found a total of 261 Chinese vessels in the West Philippine Sea: 234 at Burgos (Gaven) Reef, 18 near Pag-asa, and nine at McKennan (Hughes) Reef. Of these, at least 120 were within the Philippines’ 370-kilometer exclusive economic zone.
The “swarm” of Chinese vessels, most of them believed to be operated by the Chinese maritime militia, in Philippine waters triggered a diplomatic protest from Manila.