The habeas corpus petition of Rowena del Rosario, Mike Arroyo’s personal bookkeeper, reportedly was re-raffled yesterday. It could have landed with any member of the Court of Appeals. But it had to be Justice Sesinando Villon. Wasn’t he a law school classmate of Arroyo?
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Mike Arroyo’s rights — to travel, to due process, and to equal protection — might be violated. So the Supreme Court unanimously restrained the executive from putting him on a travel-watch list. Justice Secretary Leila de Lima and Immigration Commissioner Ricardo David must explain their side in 10 days.
Arroyo may be implicated in the fraudulent P105-million sale of used helicopters to the police as brand new. But since not yet indicted, he is still free to move around. He must not be singled out, while other persons incriminated by Senate investigations are not made to ask permission to travel. The justice department must justify its watch list aside from merely saying that the Senate requested it.
The Supreme Court is there to uphold every citizen’s freedoms. What it is doing for Arroyo, it must also do for 64,000 little folk whom Immigration brags to have stopped from leaving international airports since August 2010. They were as free to travel abroad as Mike was, and were not even in any watch list but only suspected of being unregistered overseas hires posing as tourists. They were singled out because they looked provincial, so deemed unfit to travel abroad. In the first seven months of 2011 Immigration filed 31 cases of human trafficking (as President Noynoy Aquino reported in his State of the Nation), but cannot account for the 64,000 other citizens it claims to have “saved” from slavery.
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