Time enough

THE PHILIPPINES now has its first woman Chief Justice in the person of Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno. It’s a precedent-setting appointment, but wasn’t really all that surprising in the Philippine context. Until she was disqualified because of the disbarment case against her before the Integrated Bar of the Philippines, Justice Secretary Leila de Lima seemed to be President Benigno S. Aquino III’s choice, and neither he nor de Lima took any particular pains to mask that preference.

De Lima and Sereno were among the five women candidates for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court out of a field of 22, which gave the possibility of a woman’s getting the post a near 25 percent chance by the time the Judicial and Bar Council (JBC) interviews with the nominees began on July 24.

No one, at least publicly, thought the idea of a woman Chief Justice either unusual or potentially disastrous, as it would have been thought to be in certain countries. None of the objections against de Lima or Sereno or the other women nominees were due to their gender. Against de Lima the argument was that she was too close to Aquino III, for example, while one of the complaints against Sereno was that she was, at 52 years old, too young.

During her JBC interview, to those complaints against Sereno was added her declaration that the Supreme Court was not “broken” and therefore didn’t require fixing. And yet the Court had just lost its Chief Justice after a trial which, if it did anything, demonstrated how damaged not only the Court but also the entire judicial system was, in terms of its politicization and lack of transparency, and the sense of entitlement and even lawlessness of some of its justices and judges.

In any event, the focus on qualifications—in the search for Chief Justice, on legal scholarship, track record, and commitment to judicial reform—regardless of gender is nothing unusual in Philippine public life.

The country has had two women Presidents, about whom their being women was hardly considered crucial to their capacity to discharge the responsibilities of the post. Corazon Aquino became President on the strength of perceptions that she could best preside over the dismantling of authoritarian rule and the restoration of the pre-1972 institutions of liberal democracy, while Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was, though begrudgingly, thought to be a better alternative to Joseph Estrada’s groupie presidency.

As despised as her interminable watch has been, in no instance has its lawlessness, opacity and ghastly human rights record been attributed to Arroyo’s gender, but to her singular focus on staying in power, and her peculiar moral standards.

Women have long been in Congress, whether in the House or the Senate, and in provincial and local governments, as they have been in business, the arts, the media, and the professions. Women CEOs are not unusual in the Philippines, and there are a number of editors in chief and other decision- makers in the media. Women lawyers were in ample evidence during both the Corona impeachment trial and the search for Chief Justice. They are already the majority among OFWs, which, among other indicators, probably suggests how far more focused on the welfare and future of their families Filipino women are.

But the marked presence—even the seeming eminence—of women in Philippine life is contradicted by the difficulties encountered by such proposed laws of particular relevance to women as that on divorce and reproductive health, due primarily to male resistance.

The RH bill now pending in Congress, while merely providing women information on how to space pregnancies, and making it the responsibility of government to provide the means to that end, has encountered the most incredible and most inane opposition from, among other worthies, a male senator with a penchant for soap opera drama and plagiarism.

The divorce bill, the passage of which would enable women to free themselves from the shackles of bad, usually violence-riddled, marriages, is encountering the same resistance. In both cases the (purely male) Catholic hierarchy has been the main stumbling block, in one more demonstration of how stubbornly it has clung to its traditional role of opposing every change no matter how minimal in this, the only Christian country in Asia.

Into this complex context has Sereno been cast as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, where nearly every legal issue eventually lands. The question now is not only whether Sereno will fix a Supreme Court and a judicial system she said wasn’t broken, but also, will a Sereno Court—which, unless she is herself impeached, will last all of nearly one generation at 18 years—be distinguished by, among others, decisions and rulings that will, in recognition of the ground-level truth that Filipino women are and have always been the equals of men, complete their empowerment? Or will the pronouncedly Catholic Sereno balk in consideration of the views of the Church?

Institutions always lag behind the realities that already obtain in societies. That is no less true in the Philippines, where—to the surprise of many of those foreign observers who see in the participation, and even commanding presence of women in Philippine society proof positive of gender equality—there is no divorce, and information on such a fundamental matter as their own bodies is being denied. A Sereno court will have the opportunity to, among others, correct the contradiction between what’s really happening, and certain of this country’s institutions’ state of denial of what is and has been a reality in this country for decades. Eighteen years should be time enough. It might even be too long.