Unchilled and unchastened

IF THE Supreme Court has taken the tragedy befalling its chief as only a proper signal for it to shape up, it doesn’t at all show. There seems in fact a continuous closing of ranks, club-fashion, against the exact same principle on which he was impeached, convicted, and fired – transparency.

If anyone has forgotten that Renato Corona got his comeuppance for concealing 98 percent of his financial worth – going by the compelling mathematical logic of prosecutor-congressman Rudy Fariñas – that would be the most incredible failure of memory: It all happened only yesterday!

To be sure, it’s no failure of memory but rather – and worse – failure of principle that the Supreme Court has ruled that all judges – not just those of its own court – have a choice to reveal or not their statements of assets, liabilities, and networth (SALN) to whoever asks.

The public’s right to information “is not absolute,” declares the Supreme Court. “While providing guarantee for that right, the Constitution also provides that the people’s right to know is limited to ‘matters of public concern’ and is further subject to such limitations as may be provided by law.”

While that may be so, the suggestion that that right may be denied as it applies to a judge’s SALN – definitely a matter of public concern, especially given the plague of official corruption – is not only self-serving but also morally questionable. But then, you may ask, who is to question the court that precisely possesses the power of last pronouncement in matters of law? Who else but an impeachment court, as again demonstrated at Corona’s trial.

But why raise a challenge already proven to be a losing one when it’s simpler and more sensible, not to mention nobler, for anyone holding official power to reveal how much he or she is worth financially? How do you at all justify self-concealment where trustworthiness is the virtue at issue? How can you trust someone in the shadows?

The point is simple and logical enough: The more one conceals, the more one is suspected and less trusted. But nothing seems too simple or too logical that cannot be muddled with misrepresentations by a suitably predisposed mind. Again, Corona is living proof, and the court he has left tends, it seems, to follow in his tracks.

When the impeachment court asked Corona’s lawyers “what injury” would be caused their client by revealing his worth – a fair fortune, as happened – they said he could become a target for kidnapping for ransom. I find the reasoning at once suspicious and ridiculous: Judges must really have a great deal to hide, but then who in his right criminal mind would kidnap a judge? In fact it was injury of a wholly different sort that Corona tried to escape – injury from a fall into ignominy.

With his fall widely felt deserved and significant, hopes of a judicial cleansing rose. But how could those hopes hold with a Supreme Court remaining unchilled and unchastened, in fact digging in on SALN, the very ground where its own leader fell disgraced?