(Eagle News)–Senator Leila de Lima on Tuesday, Sept. 17, asked the Ombudsman to spare her from explaining the rules on the Good Conduct Time Allowance law and to instead direct its queries to the Department of Justice and the Department of the Interior and Local Government.
In a three-page letter to Ombudsman Samuel Martires, De Lima said she was, after all, “no longer the Secretary of Justice,” and was “now a Senator of the Republic.”
“I cannot in my official capacity as a Senator reply to a query that exclusively pertains to official business of the Department of Justice whose present Secretary is Menardo Guevarra,” De Lima said in response to Martires’ letter she and Mar Roxas explain the implementing rules and regulations of the law that reduces the sentence of inmates for good conduct.
The IRR were issued in 2014, during the time of De Lima and Roxas as Justice secretary and Interior secretary, respectively.
According to De Lima, she cannot reply to Martires’ queries because she no longer has access to members of the joint Bureau of Corrections -Bureau of Jail Management and Penology panel that drafted the IRR and the DOJ’s “relevant officers or offices that reviewed or passed upon the same, as well as the records of their proceedings.”
She added the IRR were “issued during my time in my official capacity as the Secretary of Justice and as an institutional output of the Department of Justice together with the Department of the Interior and Local Government.”
Even then, “as the final authority then as Secretary of Justice, jointly with then DILG Secretary Mar A. Roxas, who approved and signed that document,” De Lima affirmed what she said were the IRR’s “regularity, correctness, and consistency with the law.”
She also noted it was unclear to her whether she was asked by the Ombudsman to clarify the IRR as a resource person, as a respondent in an administrative investigation, or as a respondent in a criminal investigation.
“I presume it is not as a resource person because I am being required to reply within a time period which is not usually a discourtesy that is addressed to resource persons,” she said.
If she was being required to clarify as a respondent in an administrative investigation, De Lima said that under Section 21 of RA 6770, or The Ombudsman Act of 1989, the Ombudsman has no jurisdiction or authority over her as a sitting senator.
“Finally, if I am being required to clarify as a respondent in a criminal investigation, I have decided to first wait for a subpoena on a criminal complaint duly filed with your office,” she added.
Earlier, Martires gave De Lima and Roxas three days to explain why the IRR of the GCTA law did not explicitly ban convicts of heinous crimes from availing of the benefits of the measure.
Martires had noted the law itself explicitly prohibited that category of inmates from availing of the benefits of the law.
Martires’ request was part of the Ombudsman’s probe launched following President Rodrigo Duterte’s directive after the release of convicts of heinous crimes under the measure.
The DOJ under Guevarra, and the DILG under Interior Secretary Eduardo Año, on Monday, Sept. 16, signed the IRR recommended by a joint DOJ-DILG panel tasked to review the same.
Guevarra and Año gave the panel an additional 60 days to complete its review of the uniform policy and guidelines on GCTA accreditation.
