Speech of Vice President Jejomar C. Binay during the launch of the IBP National Center for Legal Aid’s OFW Legal Assistance Unit and
Anti-Trafficking in Persons Action Team (ATIPAT), JBL Reyes Hall, IBP Building, Ortigas Center, 12 September 2011.

               It feels great to be back with the IBP.  The last time we were together at the Subic Convention Center, we were almost four thousand strong, quite a good indication of the vitality of our IBP under its present leadership.  

                And it is further testament to IBP’s growing importance as an institution in our society that it spearheads the celebration of National Law Week.  Your invitation to keynote this event honors me both as a member of our profession and as your Vice President.

               As principal presidential adviser on Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW) Concerns, chairman emeritus of the Inter-Agency Committee Against Trafficking (IACAT), and chairman of the Presidential Task Force Against Illegal Recruitment (PTFAIR), I am extremely pleased with the projects and advocacies IBP will be launching today. 

               The launching of the Overseas Filipino Workers Legal Assistance Unit (OFW-LAU) and the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Action Teams (ATIPAT) under IBP’s National Center for Legal Aid is a great boost to our government’s effort to protect the rights and dignity of our Filipino workingmen and women abroad and to combat the international scourge of human trafficking. 

               I have been briefed on your plan to create an OFW legal assistance unit and an action team against human trafficking in every chapter of the IBP, and I have nothing but the highest words of encouragement and support for this initiative. This is an unprecedented move on the part of the IBP and will work hand-in-glove with our government’s on-the-ground program against human trafficking and to protect our OFWs, who remain potential targets of exploitation by criminal minds.

               I could not have asked for a better program.  For next to the national government, it is the IBP, with its army of lawyers and its network of chapters spread all over the country,  that has the capability to help our fellow Filipinos from falling victims to illegal recruiters and human traffickers.  So I cannot thank you and congratulate you enough for this project.

               As you know we have made some noticeable gains in the fight against human trafficking.  When I first met Ambassador Robert Cdebaca, the US State Department official in charge of the global campaign against human trafficking, in Washington, DC last February, we were among the countries whose record in combating human trafficking did not inspire much hope. But by the time I had my second meeting with Ambassador Cdebaca in Washington last June, the situation had changed, and by the time the US State Department released its 2011 Trafficking in Persons Report, we had moved from Tier 2 watchlist to Tier 2 standing, a change which prompted US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to commend the “sea change” in our approach to the human trafficking problem.  President Benigno S. Aquino himself was proud to report this as one of the genuine achievements of the new administration in his second State of the Nation Address.

               But the enemy never sleeps, and so much more needs to be done.

               The Trafficking in Persons Report provides us some ideas on how we move the country to Tier 1 Status.  These are no great secrets. We know what needs to be done, we only need to have the will to do everything that needs to be done. We must recognize that human trafficking is not only a crime against its specific victims, but above all a crime against our own people, and against their very future. We must, therefore, seek to attain Tier 1 status not for its own sake, but rather as a function of our effort to rid our country and our civilization of this crime against people. There is no place in our world for any kind of slavery and human trafficking.

               Compañeros/Compañeras, the marching orders have been given, the fight is on.

               The Report specifically recommends that we sustain the intensified effort to investigate, prosecute, and convict effectively an increased number of both labor and sex trafficking offenders involved in the trafficking of Filipinos both within the country and abroad.1  This is where your training and expertise as lawyers --as litigators and prosecutors, as counselors-at-law and advocates in the communities-- will come in.

               Last year the US State Department singled out Zamboanga Assistant City Prosecutor Darlene Pajarito for the Trafficking in Persons’ Hero Award for her handling the largest number of successful human trafficking prosecutions in the Philippines.  Every one of you can be a Darlene Pajarito given the opportunity to serve.   I have no doubt about it.  With the creation of IBP legal assistance units for OFW and action teams against human traffickers all over the country, the sterling accomplishment of Prosecutor Darlene will surely be replicated several folds.
 
                The opportunity for service cannot be lesser than the challenges. These are some facts and statistics:

               There are many other cases, which remain undocumented.

               Given the harsh economic realities in our country, many among our poor and working people  have been driven to take up any kind of work, no matter the risks and dangers involved.  Many of the next generation of Filipinos are being made to beg in the streets, or driven into prostitution, drug pushing, and illegal fishing expeditions.

                It is against these horrors that we join forces today.  Let the enthusiasm and crusading spirit pervading in the four corners of the JBL Reyes Memorial Hall guide us in this fight. There may be no actual material rewards in this endeavor.  That is usually the case when we take up the cudgels for our poor and down-trodden.  But I draw inspiration from that exhilarating feeling we get as lawyers whenever justice wins.   Success fee or none, justice is its own reward.

                I cannot close without making what may be a necessary digression.  This has nothing to do with human trafficking, but it has to do with the rule of law, which involves us all. And it has to do with protecting the rights of the people, especially the poor.  I was doing a short executive program in national and international security in Harvard last month when I heard, to my great delight, that the Department of Justice had decided to file charges against Globe Asiatique and some officers of the Pagibig Fund for a series of anomalies that had victimized the poor. 

But lo and behold, even before the DOJ could formally release its finding of probable cause against the parties concerned, its proposed legal action, which was nearly unanimously welcomed by the housing sector, was preemptively restrained by a Temporary Restraining Order issued by the Pasig Regional Trial Court Judge Rolando Mislang. This means that the Judge acted in favor of Globe Asiatique and its accomplices and accessories even before he had no way of knowing whether the DOJ’s finding of probable cause was correct or not.  This is legally unacceptable.

                In another case, Quezon City Judge Tita Marilyn Payoyo-Villordon issused a writ of possession in favor of  one Wilfredo Torres  to a 24-hectare property occupied by thousands of persons who were never parties to the recovery case filed by Torres against a couple who had allegedly purchased the property from Torres’s parents, but had failed to pay them the full purchase price.   Torres’s claim had been previously exposed to have been based on fake titles, coming from spurious sources. 

                These two cases are known to the nation, and especially to the legal profession.  They impact adversely not only on the rule of law in our country, but also on our efforts to alleviate the housing needs of the poor, which constitute my main concern as  chairman of Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC).

                I will not detain you with any further commentaries on these two cases.  But they sharply provoke our sense of justice and our sense of law, primarily as legal practitioners.  And as the perceptive lawyer-columnist of Philippine Star Jose C. Sison puts it in his column today, “If these two cases will not be properly addressed, dangerous precedents undermining the criminal justice system and the Torrens system of registration of titles may seep in and destroy the rule of law.”
 
                I ask the IBP to ponder this issue well, and see how we can work together to make sure the rule of law prevails.

                Thank you once again, MABUHAY ANG INTEGRATED BAR OF THE PHILIPPINES!