Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) Spokesman Eduardo Malaya said the government is working on having bilateral transfers of sentenced persons agreements (TSPAs) with countries in the Middle East (ME) that would enable Filipino prisoners in those states to serve their jail term in the Philippines.

The TSPA provides the legal framework for the transfer of sentenced individuals, for humanitarian reasons, to their home countries in order to serve the remaining portion of their sentence.

“We will continue to negotiate bilateral TSPAs with countries which are not members of the Strasbourg Convention, particularly those in the Middle East,” Malaya, who is also the head of the DFA’s Office of Legal Affairs (OLA), said.

“Let me add that these prisoner transfer arrangements may take place only with the consent of the sentenced prisoner. If he is fine where is currently confined, so be it,” he said.

Malaya said the DFA is working with the Department of Justice (DoJ) on the Philippine accession to the 1983 Strasbourg Convention on the Transfer of Sentenced Persons.

The Strasbourg Convention, he explained, is the multilateral framework on prisoner transfers involving 63 countries, including Japan, Australia, the whole of Europe and the United States.

The first instance of a transfer under the TSPA is that with Spain, wherein Francisco Juan “Paco” Larrañaga was transferred to the Centro Penitenciario Madrid 5-Soto del Real penal facility in Spain in October, 2009.

Larranaga will serve the remainder of his life sentence at the Spanish penal facility after being convicted for the kidnapping, rape, and killing of sisters Jacqueline and Marijoy Chiong in Cebu in 1997.

Larranaga was convicted, along with six others, by the Cebu City Regional Trial Court in 1999.

Larrañaga has family members in the Guipuzcoa and Catalonia areas in Spain.

Malaya, meanwhile, said they are working on the first transfer of some Filipinos imprisoned in Hong Kong.

“We are currently working on the first return of the first two or three Filipino sentenced persons from Hongkong,” he said. There are about eight million Filipino migrants, including OFWs, all over the world, an estimated 5,000 of whom are detained for various offenses.