CatholicJukebox.com
Visit Greenpeace.org to help prevent environmental destruction.

June 26, 2007

"From strength to strength"

Recent post in Newsbreak on the Chief Justice's public pronouncements. Read here.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Amen, especially to your last paragraph. I was interviewed by CJ Puno back when I was an underbar and when I discussed our death penalty PLJ paper with him, he said he's just waiting for the lawyers to file proper cases and present valid arguments so the Court can rule upon it and do away with capital punishment altogether, well I can't remember his exact words. He knows that his pen is mighty, that I can say about this CJ.

Anonymous said...

Hi Ted, reading this two months later and after the Asian Justices' Forum on Environment where CJ Puno asked Judge Brian Preston of the Australian Land and Environment Court how they were able to remove barriers to public interest litigation. On the environment front in particular, it's not been encouraging. Dan sent me these links -- http://angelicmoo.blogspot.com/2007/08/end-of-oposa.html and
http://angelicmoo.blogspot.com/2007/08/end-of-oposa-conclusion.html. To quote from the first link, he describes his two published articles: "The first piece posited that Oposa is essentially misunderstood in that everything the Court said about standing to sue is merely obiter dictum, and not binding on any court. In fact, the Court merely remanded the case to the trial court saying that the petitioners in that case had a cause of action and that the trial court should not have dismissed the case in the first place. The lawyers did not pursue the case, however. The second piece showed that the rest of the Supreme Court’s decisions affecting the environment are in fact hostile to the environment revealing that the Court’s reputation for environmental activism is undeserved." Am holding my breath on the GMO case. In any case, I hope that Oposa or not, CJ Puno considers environment as a fundamental right enough to craft a remedy where there is none. Ubi jus ibi remedium, after all, human rights or not.