Ombudsman Samuel Martires may have misunderstood the mandate of his office and the Constitution in seeking to penalize individuals who make comments about the wealth of public officials, opposition Senator Leila de Lima said.
In her dispatch on Friday, Sept. 10, the detained senator rejected Martires' proposition that a law be passed to imprison people for at least five years for commenting on the Statements of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth (SALNs) publicized in the media.
"If an alien from another planet landed on the Philippines for the first time, it would think that the Office of the Ombudsman was created to defend and protect abusive and corrupt public officials from the citizenry, instead of the other way around," De Lima said.
"Martires even makes it a point to propose a law penalizing citizens who would comment on the SALNs of public officials, in the off chance that they are even given access to it by the Ombudsman, forgetting all the Constitutional Law lessons he has learned from law school and wrote about as a Supreme Court Justice on what is otherwise well-known to everybody else as the freedom of speech, the unconstitutionality of prior restraint statutes, and finally, the purpose of the constitutional mandate on the filing of SALNs," she added.
During a hearing in the House of Representatives on Thursday, Martires asked lawmakers to craft "stringent" penalties for "anyone who makes a comment on the SALN of a particular government official or employee".
In the meantime that such a law has not been passed, his order to protect the SALNs from media scrutiny will remain, he said.
"Because that is what Ombudsman Samuel Martires projects to be the mission of his office: to protect public officials from the public, instead of investigating their wrongdoing," De Lima said.
"For Ombudsman Martires, his job as Ombudsman is clear: keep the President’s SALN away from the public, as he has already done after denying the request made by my lawyers, and protect the interests of public officials, rather than that of the public," she added.
"He must have read a different Article on Public Accountability in the 1987 Constitution, because nothing there remotely supports Martires’ musings on what he thinks his job is as Ombudsman," De Lima further said of Martires.