Malacañang said on Thursday that there is no urgency in resolving the Marcos burial issue since the administration has more pressing problems to attend to, a Palace official said on Thursday.

Secretary Ramon Carandang of the  Presidential Communications Development and Strategic Planning Office (PCDSPO) said President Aquino will consider the opinion of others, including human-rights violation victims of the Marcos administration, before deciding on the recommendation of Vice President Jejomar Binay on the issue.

“There are many more urgent issues that we need to attend to before the Marcos burial. So while there are recommendations and there are opinions and the President is mulling many of these opinions and the recommendations, I think he prefers to focus on other things right now. This issue can wait,” Carandang said.

He said that since Binay was tasked to study the Marcos burial issue, many people have approached the President to give their opinion on the matter.

“Apparently after all these years, it’s still a sensitive issue… the Marcos burial. Ang daming nagbibigay ng kanilang opinion. There are human-rights [violation] victims who have personally tried to explain to the President why they feel he should not be given that burial at the Libingan ng mga Bayani,” he said.

Carandang said he recently met with former President Fidel Ramos to discuss with him the latter’s experience, as well as the conditions set by his administration, when the body of the late strongman Ferdinand Marcos was allowed to return to the country in 1993.

“We are studying what happened in 1993 to see if there’s any way that the incident there could help us make a decision,” he said.

Carandang said since the Marcos burial is a sensitive issue, the Aquino administration “wants to hear as much of these opinions as we can,” some of which have been coursed through Cabinet members.

“So even while there are recommendations of the Vice President, we are still talking to other people who have very strong feelings about the Marcos burial ...[who] want to make sure that they’re heard,” he said.

When asked, Carandang explained that “if someone told that they were raped and abused during that administration and they want to make their views heard, then I think you owe it to them to at least listen to them.”

But he also said that the recommendation of Binay—to accord full military honors to Marcos and have him buried in his hometown of Batac, Ilocos Norte—“carries a lot of weight because he was tasked to make the recommendation” and it would be “the template where we would base the final decision of President Aquino.”