Liberty and prosperity should blossom
hand in hand — Chief Justice

SHOULD we surrender our individual freedoms and liberties to the State, so that our country can achieve economic prosperity?

The answer, for Chief Justice Artemio Panganiban, is no.

In a speech he delivered yesterday at the Georgetown Law Center in Washington, the Chief Justice said liberty and prosperity are “mutually inclusive;” the courts must work hard, he said, to contribute to the pursuit of both.

“Liberty must include the freedoms that prosperity allows,” Panganiban said. “In the same manner, prosperity must include liberty, especially the liberty to strive for the “good life” according to the person’s conception.”

Liberty, thus, “becomes the guarantee that, free from all interference and suppression, we all can conceive of the good life and act according to those conceptions!”

Panganiban said he rejects the so-called “disjunctive scheme,” that holds the view that for prosperity to be achieved, the people’s freedom must be curtailed.

“I am convinced that political liberty — the clarion call of the past — must be continuously safeguarded in the present and in the future. I am equally persuaded, though, that the prosperity of our people requires as much nurturing in the present century as that accorded to liberty in the past.”

The chief justice paid homage to the United States’ struggle for civil liberties, which he called, “long and difficult”:

“The freedoms you have won with so much sacrifice and suffering have become the bedrock of your democratic system and economic progress. Indeed, those freedoms have become so inextricably linked to each other that it seems unthinkable to conceive of liberty without prosperity, or prosperity without liberty.”

The chief justice then told his audience about the “twin beacons” which, he said, guide the Philippine judiciary:

Safeguarding liberty. In litigations involving civil liberties, Panganiban said, “the scales should weigh heavily against the government and in favor of the people — particularly the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized, the dispossessed, and the weak.”

The courts shall thus view any action, which will restrict the people’s fundamental rights, with “heightened scrutiny.”

The chief justice referred to three recent decisions issued by the Supreme Court in the last month: invalidating major provisions of Executive Order No. 464; upholding the people’s right to peaceably assemble and seek redress for grievances and shooting down the government’s Calibrated Preemptive Response policy; and upholding the civil liberties of the people under a state of national emergency, as issued through Presidential Proclamation 1017.

Calling them “landmark” decisions, Panganiban said those rulings “upheld the primacy of civil liberties over government actions.”

Nurturing prosperity. Meanwhile, Panganiban said, in conflicts affecting the economy, “deference must be accorded to the political branches of the government.”

This is why, he said, the Supreme Court in 1997 upheld the Philippine Senate’s ratification of the World Trade Organization Agreement and, in 2004, the constitutionality of the Mining Act.

He said the high tribunal, in those two instances, did not wish “to pass upon the merits or wisdom of trade liberalization and economic globalization as economic policies, or upon the desirability of allowing 100-percent foreign investments in large-scale mining.”

In the same speech, Panganiban also spoke about the ills that he says plague the Philippine judiciary:

• limited access to justice by the poor
• corruption
• incompetence
• delay in the delivery of quality judgments

Judicial reforms initiated by his predecessor, Hilario Davide Jr., should thus be revitalized, he said.

Read the full text of Panganiban’s speech.