Reimposition of capital punishment

1. While the Philippine Constitution holds sacrosanct the right to life, it allows for a narrow exception that the capital punishment may be imposed “for compelling reasons involving heinous crimes” as provided by Congress. Congress’s power to enact legislation reimposing death penalty is, however, qualified by “one of the oldest and fundamental rules in international law” incorporated in the Charter itself: pacta sunt servanda. So basic and cardinal is this norm that the Supreme Court has unequivocally declared it as, effectively, a limit to the sovereign powers of the State, as it has “subject(ed) (itself) to restrictions and limitations voluntarily… as a member of the family of nations.”

2. This constitutional duty to observe international legal obligations is put to test by the Philippine Legislature’s recent, impassioned interest in reimposing the capital punishment. While we remain steadfast in upholding our State’s sovereign rights, our exercise thereof must remain within the bounds of International Law. As a State Party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and its Second Optional Protocol, the Philippines has obligated itself not to reintroduce capital punishment after it has already abolished the same...

3. The commitment to respect international obligations now precludes the invocation of Section 19(1), Article III of the Constitution, which serves as a manifest deviation from the constitutional recognition of the value of “man more than property, … people more than the state, and … life more than mere existence.” This reaffirmation of the respect of the right to life is in consonance with the Charter’s social justice provisions, “the heart of the (Consti- tution),” especially considering the death penalty’s widely demonstrated futility in deterring crimes and its disproportionate and oppressive effect to the poor and marginalized sectors of society.

4. Given the straightforward intent of the Constitution’s framers to delete the death penalty from Philippine criminal laws and make its restoration possible “only under and subject to stringent conditions,” the permissive character of this constitutional fiat must defer to the proscriptive imperative of the State’s incorporation of its conventional obligations under Section 2, Article II of the Constitution...

5. In reimposing the capital punishment, therefore, the members of the House of Representative would not only violate International Law, they would also violate the Constitution itself—“the highest law of (our) land” and “the fundamental, paramount and supreme law of (our) nation” to which all persons, including the highest officials of the land, must defer. It bears recalling, then, that the Constitution, which itself irrefutably respects the nation’s international legal obligations, “cannot be simply made to sway and accommodate the call of situations and much more tailor itself to the whims and caprices of the government and the people who run it.”

The conscious decision by the Lower House to reinstate the death penalty, if the rule of law were to be respected and if justice were to be truly served, must be condemned.--

Ateneo Society of International Law, De La Salle University Law Debate & Moot Court Society, Far Eastern University Institute of Law Moot Court Council, Silliman Law Moot Court Society, and the University of the Philippines Law Debate & Moot Court Union