ARMANDO Q. CANLAS, MIGUEL D. CAPISTRANO, MARRIETA PIA, vs. NAPICO HOMEOWNERS ASSN., I XIII, INC., ET AL.,

ARMANDO Q. CANLAS, MIGUEL D. CAPISTRANO, MARRIETA PIA, vs. NAPICO HOMEOWNERS ASSN., I XIII, INC., ET AL.,

G.R. No. 182795 June 5, 2008

Facts:

Petitioners are settlers in a certain parcel of land situated in the Brgy. Manggahan, PasigCity. Their dwellings have either been demolished as of the time of filing of the petition, or is about to be demolished pursuant to a court judgment. They claim that they were deprived of their liberty, freedom and/or rights to shelter enshrined and embodied in our Constitution. Petitioners claim that respondents hold fraudulent and spurious titles issued by certain Land Officials. Thus, the petition for writ of amparo.

Issue: WON the writ of amparo is a correct remedy for the petitioners.

Held: No. The Writ of Amparo does not cover the cause of the petitioners. The Rule on the Writ of Amparo provides:

Section 1. Petition. The petition for a writ of amparois a remedy available to any person whose right to life, liberty and securityis violated or threatened with violation by an unlawful act or omission of a public official or employee, or of a private individual or entity.

The writ shall cover extralegal killings and enforced disappearances or threats thereof. (Emphasis supplied.)

The threatened demolition of a dwelling by virtue of a final judgment of the court, which in this case was affirmed with finality by this Court in G.R. Nos. 177448, 180768, 177701, 177038, is not included among the enumeration of rights as stated in the above-quoted Section 1 for which the remedy of a writ of amparo is made available. Their claim to their dwelling, assuming they still have any despite the final and executory judgment adverse to them, does not constitute right to life, liberty and security. There is, therefore, no legal basis for the issuance of the writ of amparo.

LOURDES D. RUBRICO, JEAN RUBRICO APRUEBO, and MARY JOY RUBRICO CARBONEL, vs.GLORIA MACAPAGAL-ARROYO, GEN. HERMOGENES ESPERON, P/DIR. GEN. AVELINO RAZON, MAJ. DARWIN SY a.k.a. DARWIN REYES, JIMMY SANTANA, RUBEN ALFARO, CAPT. ANGELO CUARESMA, a certain JONATHAN, P/SUPT. EDGAR B. ROQUERO, ARSENIO C. GOMEZ, and OFFICE OF THE OMBUDSMAN,

G.R. No. 183871 February 18, 2010

Facts:

On 03 April 2007, Lourdes Rubrico, chair of Ugnayan ng Maralita para sa Gawa Adhikan, was abducted by armed men belonging to the 301st Air Intelligence and Security Squadron (AISS) based in Lipa City while attending a Lenten pabasa in Dasmarinas, Cavite. She was brought to and detained at the air base without charges. She was released a week after relentless interrogation, but only after she signed a statement that she would be a military asset.

Despite her release, she was tailed on at least 2 occasions. Hence, Lourdes filed a complaint with the Office of the Ombudsman a criminal complaint for kidnapping and arbitrary detention and grave misconduct against Cuaresma, Alfaro, Santana, and Jonathan, but nothing has happened. She likewise reported the threats and harassment incidents to the Dasmarinas municipal and Cavite provincial police stations, but nothing eventful resulted from their investigation.

Meanwhile, the human rights group Karapatan conducted an investigation which indicated that men belonging to the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) led the abduction of Lourdes. Based on such information, Rubrico filed a petition for the writ of amparo with the Supreme Court on 25 October 2007, praying that respondents be ordered to desist from performing any threatening act against the security of petitioners and for the Ombudsman to immediately file an information for kidnapping qualified with the aggravating circumstance of gender of the offended party. Rubrico also prayed for damages and for respondents to produce documents submitted to any of them on the case of Lourdes.

The Supreme Court issued the desired writ and then referred the petition to the Court of Appeals (CA) for summary hearing and appropriate action. At the hearing conducted on 20 November 2007, the CA granted petitioners motion that the petition and writ be served on Darwin Sy/Reyes, Santana, Alfaro, Cuaresma, and Jonathan. By a separate resolution, the CA dropped the President as respondent in the case.

On 31 July 2008, after due proceedings, the CA rendered its partial judgment, dismissing the petition with respect to Esperon, Razon, Roquero, Gomez, and Ombudsman.Hence, the petitioners filed a Petition for Review on Certiorari with the Supreme Court

Issue:

Whether or not the [CA] committed reversible error in dismissing [their] Petition and dropping President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo as party respondent

Whether or not the doctrine of command responsibility is applicable in an amparo petition.

Held:

The presidential immunity from suit remains preserved under our system of government, albeit not expressly reserved in the present constitution. Addressing a concern of his co-members in the 1986 Constitutional Commission on the absence of an express provision on the matter, Fr. Joaquin Bernas, S.J. observed that it was already understood in jurisprudence that the President may not be sued during his or her tenure.

Settled is the doctrine that the President, during his tenure of office or actual incumbency, may not be sued in any civil or criminal case, and there is no need to provide for it in the Constitution or law. It will degrade the dignity of the high office of the President, the Head of State, if he can be dragged into court litigations while serving as such.

According to Fr. Bernas, "command responsibility," in its simplest terms, means the "responsibility of commanders for crimes committed by subordinate members of the armed forces or other persons subject to their control in international wars or domestic conflict." In this sense, command responsibility is properly a form of criminal complicity.

While there are several pending bills on command responsibility, there is still no Philippine law that provides for criminal liability under that doctrine. It would be inappropriate to apply to these proceedings the doctrine of command responsibility, as the CA seemed to have done, as a form of criminal complicity through omission, for individual respondents criminal liability, if there be any, is beyond the reach of amparo. In other words, the Court does not rule in such proceedings on any issue of criminal culpability, even if incidentally a crime or an infraction of an administrative rule may have been committed. As the Court stressed in Secretary of National Defense v. Manalo (Manalo), the writ of amparo was conceived to provide expeditious and effective procedural relief against violations or threats of violation of the basic rights to life, liberty, and security of persons; the corresponding amparo suit, however, "is not an action to determine criminal guilt requiring proof beyond reasonable doubt x x x or administrative liability requiring substantial evidence that will require full and exhaustive proceedings."

In their petition for a writ of amparo, petitioners asked, as their main prayer, that the Court order the impleaded respondents "to immediately desist from doing any acts that would threaten or seem to threaten the security of the Petitioners and to desist from approaching Petitioners, x x x their residences and offices where they are working under pain of contempt of [this] Court." Petitioners, however, failed to adduce the threshold substantive evidence to establish the predicate facts to support their cause of action, i.e., the adverted harassments and threats to their life, liberty, or security, against responding respondents, as responsible for the disappearance and harassments complained of. This is not to say, however, that petitioners allegation on the fact of the abduction incident or harassment is necessarily contrived. The reality on the ground, however, is that the military or police connection has not been adequately proved either by identifying the malefactors as components of the AFP or PNP; or in case identification is not possible, by showing that they acted with the direct or indirect acquiescence of the government. For this reason, the Court is unable to ascribe the authorship of and responsibility for the alleged enforced disappearance of Lourdes and the harassment and threats on her daughters to individual respondents. To this extent, the dismissal of the case against them is correct and must, accordingly, be sustained.