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THE
group of martial-law victims who won a court award in
Hawaii in 1995, which remained unsatisfied by the Marcos
estate, suffered another setback in its claim on the
$35-million Arelma account at the
New York
firm Merrill Lynch, which is also claimed by the Manila
government.
On
Tuesday (Manila time) the United States Supreme Court
decided to grant the Philippine government’s petition to
hear the case on merits.
American
lead counsel for the claimants Robert Swift and his
Filipino counterpart Rod Domingo Jr. criticized
Manila’s effort to foil the award to the victims for
their long-overdue claim, and said the US decision on
the Arelma ownership, discovered in 1999 by the
Presidential Commission on Good Government, is supposed
to be rendered this week, but may now be postponed until
middle of next year.
“The
Philippine government asked the US Supreme Court to
review the question of whether the judgment should be
thrown out because the government, which was entitled to
sovereign immunity from litigation in the US, was
indispensable to the litigation. Instead of kowtowing to
the Philippine government, the Supreme Court only agreed
to hear the question of whether it even had standing to
appeal the judgment once it was dismissed from the
litigation,” said a joint statement of Swift and Domingo
issued on Tuesday.
The
lawyers had filed a claim on the Arelma account against
New York firm Merrill Lynch in September 2000, prompting
the Philippine government to join the lawsuit at the US
District Court of Hawaii.
Swift
argued, “Despite its lack of proof, the government
repeatedly sought to prevent a
US
court from adjudicating the case, forcing over nine
appeals to the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.”
The
government even sought to remove the trial judge, the
distinguished
US jurist Manuel Real, from the hearing the case. In November
2006 a unanimous US Court of Appeals for the Ninth
Circuit called the Republic’s arguments without merit.”
Swift,
who also won a $2-billion class suit for a group of
Holocaust victims, said the initial distribution of
$2,000 each for the martial-law claimants in time for
Christmas will now be delayed. “We are disappointed that
there will be another delay in distribution of the money
to the Filipino victims. We were hoping to give the
victims a nice Christmas present.”
Domingo
criticized the PCGG, on the other hand, for authorizing
the release of over $1 million to pay for fees of its
American hired lawyers in order to prevent the victims
from claiming the disputed Marcos money.
“Far
from helping Filipino human-rights victims, this
administration spends limitless funds of the people to
defeat the claims of the martial-law victims. That money
could have been spent feeding the poor of this nation.
With far fewer resources, but God on our side, we expect
to win in the US Supreme Court,” said Domingo.
The
claimant group of martial law victims—tortured,
summarily executed or disappeared—won a landmark
$2.35-billion judgment against the Marcos estate in 1995
at the US federal court of Honolulu, and was declared
final and executory by the US Supreme Court in 1997. |
