Guevarra: Filipinos have right to challenge Anti-Terror Law
Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra said Monday Filipinos have the right to challenge the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 before the Supreme Court (SC).
“It is the right of every citizen to question any act of the legislature that he thinks is contrary to the fundamental law of the land,” Guevarra said, following the filing of an eighth petition asking the SC to declare as unconstitutional and prevent the implementation of the Anti-Terrorism Law.
“On the other hand, it is the bounden duty of the Supreme Court, as final arbiter of all controversies involving the rights of the citizenry, to determine with exactitude the constitutional limits of state power,” Guevarra said.
“This right and this duty are at the very heart of all the petitions filed in relation to the anti-terrorism law,” he added.
The petition was filed by the party-list organization Sanlakas which said that provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Law “crosses into the constitutionally protected areas of free speech, free expression, and free assembly.”
Sanlakas sought, in particular, sought to declare as unconstitutional and strike down Section 4 of the Anti-Terrorism Law.
The petitioner reminded the SC that “exercise of the people’s freedom of speech and expression and freedom of assembly is categorically protected by Section 4, Article III of the 1987 Constitution.”
However, it lamented that the Anti-Terrorism Law declares that “advocacy, protest, dissent, stoppage of work, industrial or mass action, and other similar exercises of civil and political rights” as a crime of terrorism when such is “intended to cause death or serious physical harm to a person, to endanger a person’s life, or to create a serious risk to public safety….”
It also said Section 4 of the law declares advocacy, protest, dissent, and similar acts as terrorism when the purpose “is to intimidate the general public or a segment thereof, create an atmosphere or spread a message of fear, to provoke or influence by intimidation the government or any international organization, or seriously destabilize or destroy the fundamental political, economic, or social structures of the country, or create a public emergency or seriously undermine public safety.”