The law sometimes seems like a pristine wilderness disconnected from the world we live in.
Case in point: Philippines senator Grace Poe is running for president of the Philippines but there just seems to be one problem.
As a child she was abandoned at birth and is thus a so-called "foundling."
That a person so disadvantaged in life could become president would be a welcome sign for many, indicating perhaps that upward social mobility is possible and that the rights of the poor and disenfranchised are in fact respected. (Grace Poe herself has discussed the issues here.)
Enter the Law.
It turns out that because Grace Poe is a foundling, "there is a possibility that she is not a natural-born citizen. Only natural-born citizens can be elected as president, vice president, senator, and congressman, according to the Constitution." (see Rappler here).
Luckily, Grace Poe has won the first round of the legal assault against her on the basis of her being an abandoned child.
However, three Supreme Court justices, the representatives of the law on the panel deciding on her disqualification from presidential candidacy, did vote to disqualify her.
One thread of legal reasoning runs like this.
1. No law automatically grants citizenship to foundlings born in the Philippines.
2. Even if there was a law that granted foundlings citizenship, they would still be only "a naturalized Filipino citizen, not a natural-born Filipino citizen."
3. Furthermore, "foundlings like Poe still have to prove his or her status as a foundling before they can acquire Philippine citizenship – as naturalized, not natural-born."
Luckily, the majority of the panel decided that "social justice" and other reasons were more compelling, such as, "it was not the intention of the framers of the 1935 Constitution to 'exclude' and 'discriminate against' foundlings when it comes to a natural-born citizenship." (also read about the call to remove those three Supreme Court justices from the decision-making process here).
DOES THE LAW HELP THE POOR?
Systematic disregard of the basic welfare of the poor and disenfranchised does seem to be a common theme, if one actually talks to the poor and attempts to find out what issues they face.
For example, mistakes on birth certificates are common in the Philippines with wrong names for parents being a common and correctable error.
Children of the poor are often delivered in the village by a midwife and not at a hospital which is one possible way to explain the origin of birth certificate mistakes.
Gender is perhaps less common but a more difficult type of error to correct, requiring the hiring of a lawyer and a court decision.
This was the expensive legal procedure required of the family of a jeepney driver in Cebu City that I once met who discovered that their son was recorded on his birth certificate as a woman and that this barred him from obtaining a passport until it was corrected.
Women who are officially men on their birth certificate cannot get officially married until it is corrected and since many are too poor to do this, one can find many mothers who are still officially men (Note: this problem has apparently been dealt with as of 2012, see here & here).
An estimated 10% of the Philippines workforce works overseas as so-called Overseas Foreign Workers (OFWs).
Strict human trafficking laws sometimes result in poor in-laws not being allowed to board airplanes to visit their family working abroad if they cannot present adequate documents at boarding time with no way to pass the document screening to a certainty with immigration officials prior to purchasing a plane ticket, thus losing the expensive plane ticket (for what is apparently an example of a similar incident that happened today, December 10, see here).
One can only hope that the Law, as an institution, does eventually develop an awareness of and concern about these issues, correcting them and showing greater respect for the poor and disenfranchised, choosing instead to work for them and solve the problems they encounter in daily life and not getting caught up in abstruse and perhaps ultimately meaningless legal niceties.
(Photo at top: Senator Grace Poe delivering a speech on the floor of the Philippines Senate. If elected president next year she will likely become the first person abandoned at birth (foundling) to ever become the head of state of a country. Photo source: Wikipedia)
http://www.rappler.com/nation/politics/elections/2016/113668-main-arguments-set-decision-grace-poe
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