SENATOR Aquilino Pimentel Jr. greets National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales as former senator Francisco Tatad waits for his turn during the Quijano de Manila forum at the Cherry Blossoms Hotel in Ermita, Manila. Gonzales talked on the finer points of the Human Security Act or the antiterrorism law. --ROY DOMINGO

NATIONAL Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales agrees with the observation that the antiterrorism law, more commonly known as the Human Security Act (HSA), is unenforceable.

“We will not touch the HSA, it is an accumulation of [previous laws] by our police officers,” Gonzales said at the Quijano de Manila Symposium at the Cherry Blossoms Hotel in Ermita district. Other guests included Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel Jr. and former senator Francisco Tatad.

Gonzales said that as the law stands, the law enforcement agencies could resort to existing laws to prosecute certain specific violations that could be defined as part of an act to overthrow governments.

He said critics of the law should go ahead and vent their anger on Republic Act 9372, hoping that many of its infirmities would get an airing and in its aftermath, a real “antiterrorism law” that specifically applies to specific persons would be crafted.

“I think the present HSA is very difficult to implement,” he declared, adding that the original proposal came from Sen. Panfilo Lacson, and yet it was the opposition who mangled the final version of the bill.

“It [HSA] is not ours,” Gonzales stressed.

However, Gonzales said that there is really a need for an antiterrorism law because of the demands of many countries that have close ties with the Philippines, aside from lobbying by local groups.

The HSA, signed by President Arroyo on March 6, 2007, has been criticized by many quarters, especially those from the Left and human-rights groups as being too arbitrary. They fret that it would allow the state to infringe on the constitutional rights of suspected members of the Communist Party of the Philippines, the New People’s Army and the National Democratic Front, who, under different circumstances would not be labelled as “terrorists.”

Tatad said the HSA is unenforceable because “it is conceptually confused and confusing.”

At the moment, he said, there is only an academic consensus on the definition of terrorism, although it gained currency only following the 9/11 attack in the United States.

Of the 100 definitions of terrorism, Tatad said that the United Nations definition of terrorism as the peacetime equivalent of war crimes is presently in vogue, while the revised penal code defines a terrorist as someone who commits a crime in order to sow and create widespread panic to coerce the government to give in to unlawful demands.

However, Tatad said that if that definition is applied, he wonders how one coerces a system to commit rebellion, coup d’etat or insurrection.

He said the current Hsa, if applied, such as for detaining a person more than three days, is a dangerous provision because there is no way at present to distinguish whether a person is an accused or a suspected terrorist.

Section 1 of the Bill of Rights says any act to deprive a person of life, liberty and property without due process is illegal, Tatad reminded the forum.

He sees the need to craft a new anti-terrorism law, arguing that “the law must be everyone’s law, and must not allow those in power to use the law for their own purposes.”

He added: “More than laws, we need an efficient and good government [with a] fairly good intelligence- gathering system.”

Gonzales agreed with Tatad’s observations, but worries for another reason: the law also penalizes arresting officials with a fine of half a million pesos if they are found to have detained a person illegally, and another half a million pesos if the sequestration of his properties is deemed to have been done illegally.

He said that payment, as required by the HSA, would come from the funds set aside for a specific military or police organization.

“The fear is that some individuals might connive and conduct false arrest [so] that the two of them would gain monetary consideration,” Gonzales said.

He noted that the present HSA has 26 provisions, of which four are against suspected terrorists and 24 are against the implementors.

If such is the case, Gonzales said that law-enforcement agents, worried that their fund might be exhausted from too much compensation for suspects, might as well produce trumped-up charges against some persons just to convict them.

Still, Gonzales said that the country must craft a very specific and unique law, because “we are now dealing with terrorists, a different kind of people.”                            

While many people are cynical about the claims of government on the existence of terrorists in our midst, he reveals that the police and military have actually stopped many acts of terrorism and neutralized some groups. He cited the seizure of hundreds of kilograms of bombs from a would-be terrorist who hid the explosives under the false bottom of a vehicle, and the arrest of some Rajah Sulaiman members in Manila, Bulacan and Pangasinan.

The Rajah Sulaiman group is responsible for the “Valentine’s Day” bombings where explosives were used in a bus in Makati City.

AS another typhoon, the third to hit the country in a span of one week, moves in, heavy rains brought by the southwest monsoon flooded parts of Metro Manila, causing heavy traffic on major thoroughfares, including Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (Edsa), the metropolis’s main thoroughfare.

THE Armed Forces denied on Wednesday reports that US troops have been directly involved in combat operations against terrorists and bandits in the province of Sulu.

THE Supreme Court (SC) yesterday affirmed the Sandiganbayan’s grant of bail to Sen. Jinggoy Estrada, a coaccused in the plunder case filed against his father, former-President Joseph Estrada before the antigraft court’s First Division.

NATIONAL Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales agrees with the observation that the antiterrorism law, more commonly known as the Human Security Act (HSA), is unenforceable.

CITY OF SAN FERNANDO—The flood-stricken province of Pampanga was declared to be under a state of calamity by its Sangguniang Panlalawigan on Monday after floods spawned by heavy downpours from two tropical storms wreaked havoc in the province last week.

SAYING that a piece of legislation could not, on its own, lower the prices of medicine, a militant legislator on Wednesday proposed a five-point legislative agenda that included the breaking up of the monopoly of large pharmaceutical companies by amending the Intellectual Property Code.

A PUZZLED Sen. Loren Legarda asked the Arroyo administration on Wednesday to clarify conflicting claims on the perceived economic gains being touted by its officials that the country would get from ratifying the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement (Jpepa).