(Eagle News) — The National Union of People’s Lawyers said on Friday, June 8, that it would seek the help of the Supreme Court after the Court of Appeals upheld its earlier decision to disallow Mary Jane Veloso, who is on death row in Indonesia, from testifying against her alleged illegal recruiters.
In a statement posted on its Facebook account, the group said they “shall legally intervene as private prosecutors” and shall “revisit and exhaust other options and channels to ensure that Mary Jane is rightfully saved from the gallows on legal, political and humanitarian grounds.”
The group said it was “regrettable that our own courts are constrained or unable to adapt or be responsive to unique situations such as the peculiar circumstances of the case in order to satisfy the more compelling interests of justice.”
“The novel legal issues provided by Mary Jane’s pathetic misfortune mandate that we should look at the forest more than the trees,” the NUPL said, slamming the June 3 CA resolution for allegedly employing a “nitpicking purely legalistic approach devoid of any social context or divorced from concrete reality..”
This “serves as blinders to a simple fact: will the testimony through the only allowable legal mode of a Filipino mother indefinitely detained on death row in a foreign land decisively and finally help answer or give light to the question of whether or not she is a victim or villain?,” the NUPL said.
In its June 3 resolution, the Court of Appeals’ former eleventh division denied the Office of the Solicitor General’s appeal for a Nueva Ecija judge to observe the deposition of Veloso, reiterating, among others, that the right of the accused, in this case Maria Cristina Sergio and her live-in partner Julius Lacanilao, to “‘meet the witnesses face to face’ is a fundamental right guaranteed by the 1987 Constitution, specifically Article III, Section 14 (2).”
In junking the OSG’s motion for reconsideration, the CA effectively upheld its December 13, 2017 decision.