10/26/2009
The Commission on Elections (Comelec) urged the Supreme Court yesterday to quickly decide on any petition challenging former President Joseph Estrada’s intention to regain the presidency to meet the prescribed schedule for the printing of official ballots before the middle of January next year.Comelec spokesman James Jimenez, at the weekly Tinapayan Forum, said the Comelec will definitely accept Estrada’s certificate of candidacy.
Jimenez, however, said it doesn’t follow that Estrada is automatically included in the official ballot listing as the time table set for the final printed ballot with names of candidates in it after November last day of filing will be December or early half of January.
The United Opposition (UNO) tandem of Estrada and Makati Mayor Jejomar Binay, meanwhile, said both welcome the Malacañang-inspired “deluge of petitions” seeking to disqualify Estrada since it would only confirm that the administration considers Estrada as the candidate to beat.
“No less than Sen. Juan Miguel Zubiri has admitted he is a serious threat while Cabinet Secretary Silvestre Bello III conceded Estrada has a “large following and his team-up with Mayor Jojo Binay as a formidable
Our legal team headed by Justice Magadangal Elma, Congressman and former law dean Rufus Rodriquez, Dean Pacifico Agabin, Dean Amado Valdez, Dean Ernest Maceda, Bar topnotcher Atty. Koko Pimentel, Election Lawyer George Garcia, after consultations with Chief Justice Andres Narvasa. Chief Justice Artemio Panganiban, Justice Serafin Cuevas and Justice Cancio Gracia, have come to a definitive conclusion that Estrada is not barred from running for election in May 2010, according to UNO.
The printing of official ballots is prescribed under the election laws to be 30 to 40 days prior to the voting.
“It will all depend on the decision of the Supreme Court if he is qualified to run or not but it must be acted as fast as the Comelec decided on the disqualification charge against (opposition standard bearer) Fernando Poe Jr. when he ran for the Presidency in 2004” Jimenez said.
Jimenez said those who will seek to disqualify Estrada must act quickly so that the matter can be immediately settled.
In the same forum, Chito Gascon, director general of Liberal Party (LP) said the party does not plan “yet” to question Estrada’s candidacy.
“The LP will confront that issue when Estrada files his certificate of candidacy. That would be studied by the party’s legal team. Anyway, if the LP does not file any challenge, I am sure somebody will”, according to Gascon.
Reggie Velasco, secretary general of Lakas-Kampi-CMD, said the administration party would not focus its effort on questioning Estrada’s candidacy since it has “more important things to do.”
The Elma research panel had cited the following arguments: Estrada is not running for “relection” but merely “running again”; the Presidential reelection ban applies only to a sitting or incumbent president to prevent said president from using his vast powers to ensure his reelection; and that the word, “reelection” means an election anew under the same terms and conditions of the immediately preceding presidential election.
Estrada recently proclaimed his team up with Binay for the elections next yea in Manila’s dockside slums of Tondo to begin a seven-month drive aimed at returning him to the presidential palace.
“This is the last performance of my life,” the 72-year-old former movie star told a crowd of about 10,000 fans in his trademark husky voice as he officially launched his election campaign last week.
Elected president by a record margin during the Asian crisis in 1998, but then impeached for massive corruption and toppled in a bloodless military coup in 2001, Estrada is seeking redemption through his unlikely campaign.
To this day he denies having taken bribes from illegal gambling operators, embezzling millions of dollars in tobacco taxes and wasting his mandate through inept rule.
He insists it was his replacement, incumbent President Gloria Arroyo, who drove the Southeast Asian nation further into poverty and chaos through corruption.
But, although Arroyo pardoned him in 2007 after he was sentenced to life in jail for graft, Estrada maintains he has been deeply victimised by the nation’s elite.
“I was also a flood victim,” he told the crowd, invoking the widespread suffering wrought by a series of tropical storms that claimed more than 1,000 lives in Manila and the northern Philippines over the past month.
“I was convicted based on a flood of lies unleashed by the elite and those who are hungry for power.”
Estrada, a college dropout from a large, middle-class family, was born at a Tondo district hospital near the basketball court-size stage where he announced he would contest the May 10, 2010 presidential election.
He gained his immense popularity through a career as an action movie star in which he played tough guy roles defending the poor.
And while he enjoys a lifestyle the Tondo slum dwellers could only dream of living, Estrada’s theme for the next election is the same as when he first ran for president — that he is the poor masses’ best chance for a better life.
His rhetoric buys a ready audience among the tens of thousands living a precarious existence in Tondo.
“We would go to prison for him if they cheated him out of an election victory,” vowed Rita Hingpes, a 54-year-old grandmother in the crowd. AFP
Source: http://www.tribune.net.ph/headlines/20091026hed2.html
No comments:
Post a Comment