The Supreme Court has appointed journalist-lawyer Michael Jobert “Mike” I. Navallo as its chief communications officer and Atty. Camille Sue Mae L. Ting as spokesperson.
Atty. Navallo will be the chief of the SC’s Communications Office, while Atty. Ting will head the Office of the Spokesperson.
Their appointments were announced by the SC late afternoon on Tuesday, April 16, in Baguio City where the SC justices are holding their traditional summer sessions.
The SC said that Navallo, who will assume office on Aug.1, 2024, was a multi-platform journalist for ABS-CBN News based in Manila and is currently a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the International Forum for Democratic Studies under the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, DC.
He worked for ABS-CBN News for eight years, mostly covering human rights stories and the Justice beat comprising the SC, appellate courts, and trial courts, and the Department of Justice.
He was part of the team that won the 2017 Society of Publishers in Asia Award for Human Rights Reporting and was given the Award of Distinction by the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility in 2023. In 2017, he was selected as a Reham al-Farra fellow by the United Nations.
He was also a four-time fellow for the Jaime V. Ongpin Journalism Seminar organized by the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility.
Prior to joining ABS-CBN News in 2015, he worked as a litigator at SyCip Law and as a research consultant for Amnesty International's research on police torture.
As the SC’s first female spokesperson, Atty. Ting will assume her post immediately.
The SC said the new spokesperson is a certified court insider, having been with the High Court for more than 11 years now.
After graduating law school, she began her career in the SC as a news analyst in 2012.
She left the SC briefly to take the 2012 Bar examinations, then rejoined the court immediately as an executive assistant in the Office of the Court Administrator.
She rose from the ranks until she became the Judicial Staff Head of Supreme Court Associate Justice Jose Midas P. Marquez in 2021.
She had served in the secretariat for various SC committees, such as the Committee on the Revision of the Rules of Court, the Sub-Committees for the Revision of the 1997 Rules of Civil Procedure, Revision of the Rules of Procedure for Intellectual Property Rights Cases, and Revision of the Rules for Criminal Procedure, Special Committee on Virtual Hearings and Electronic Testimony, and the Ad Hoc Committee for the Formulation of the Special Rules of Procedure on Anti-Terrorism Cases, to name a few.
She is also a member of the Committee on Facilitated Naturalization of Refugees and Stateless Individuals and the Special Committee on Cybercrime and Electronic Evidence.
She has also represented the SC in international conferences such as the Council of Europe’s First Meeting of the National Judicial Trainers on Cybercrime and Electronic Evidence in Strasbourg, France, and the 2018 Australia-Philippines Counter-Terrorism Study Visit in Melbourne and Sydney.