‘The democracy we continue to hold sacred’

By Atty. Rolex T. Suplico

This is a Supreme Court en banc decision on G.R. No. 187478, promulgated on Dec. 21, 2009 in the case of Representative DANILO RAMON S. FERNANDEZ, Petitioner, v. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES ELECTORAL TRIBUNAL and JESUS L. VICENTE, Respondents. Justice Leonardo De Castro wrote the decision.

Dan Fernandez filed his Certificate of Candidacy (COC) for congressman in the first district of Laguna in the May 14, 2007 elections. In his COC, he wrote that his address was at No. 13 Maharlika St., Villa Toledo Subdivision, Barangay Balibago, Sta. Rosa City, Laguna.

One Jesus L. Vicente immediately “filed a “Petition to Deny Due Course to and/or Cancel Certificate of Candidacy and Petition for Disqualification” before the Office of the Provincial Election Supervisor of Laguna. This was forwarded to the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) and docketed therein as SPA No. 07-046 (PES).” He reasoned that “during past elections, he had declared Pagsanjan, Laguna as his address, and Pagsanjan was located in the Fourth Legislative District of the Province of Laguna.”

However, the 1^st Division of the COMELEC dismissed the petition for lack of merit.

Dan “was proclaimed as the duly elected Representative of the First District of Laguna on June 27, 2007, having garnered a total of 95,927 votes, winning by a margin of 35,000 votes over the nearest candidate.”

On July 5, 2007, Jesus lost no time in filing “a petition for quo warranto before the HRET, docketed as HRET (House of Representatives Electoral Tribunal) CASE No. 07-034, praying that petitioner be declared ineligible to hold office as a Member of the House of Representatives representing the First Legislative District of the Province of Laguna, and that petitioner’s election and proclamation be annulled and declared null and void.” He argued that Dan “lacked the required one-year residency requirement provided under Article VI, Section 6 of the 1987 Constitution.”

After an unfavorable ruling from the HRET and a subsequent denial of his motion for reconsideration, Dan filed this petition before the Supreme Court for certitorari and prohibition under Rule 65 of the Rules of Court.

Let us directly deal with the Dan’s residency requirement, which is the meat of the matter of this case.

The Court ruled in his favor, quoting its ruling in the case of Frivaldo v. COMELEC:

“This Court has time and again liberally and equitably construed the electoral laws of our country to give fullest effect to the manifest will of our people, for in case of doubt, political laws must be interpreted to give life and spirit to the popular mandate freely expressed through the ballot. Otherwise stated, legal niceties and technicalities cannot stand in the way of the sovereign will. xxx (Emphasis supplied).”c”ralawlibrary

It added that since Dan won with an overwhelming mandate, “the Court must exercise utmost caution before disqualifying a winning candidate, shown to be the clear choice of the constituents that he wishes to represent in Congress.”

It then quoted Article VI, Section 6 of the Constitution:

“Section 6. No person shall be a Member of the House of Representatives unless he is a natural-born citizen of the Philippines and, on the day of the election, is at least twenty-five years of age, able to read and write, and, except the party-list representatives, a registered voter in the district in which he shall be elected, and a resident thereof for a period of not less than one year immediately preceding the day of the election. (Emphasis supplied).”cralawlibrary

It explained that “the interpretation of the HRET of the residency requirement under the Constitution to be overly restrictive and unwarranted under the factual circumstances of this case.” It stated that “(t)he evidence presented by private respondent before the HRET hardly suffices to prove that petitioner failed to comply with the one-year residency requirement under the Constitution.”

“The only thing these pieces of documentary evidence prove,” the Court said, “is that petitioner’s domicile of origin was Pagsanjan, Laguna and it remained his domicile up to 2005, at the latest. On the other hand, what petitioner asserted in his 2007 COC is that he had been a resident of Sta. Rosa, Laguna in the First District of Laguna as of February 2006 and respondent’s evidence failed contradict that claim.”

Thereafter, it examined the evidence presented by Dan:

“In order to buttress his claim that he and his family actually resided in Sta. Rosa, Laguna beginning at least in February 2006, petitioner’s evidence included, among others: (a) original and extended lease contracts for a townhouse in Villa de Toledo, Barangay Balibago, Sta. Rosa, Laguna; (b) certification issued by the President of the Villa de Toledo Homeowners Association, Inc, that petitioner has been a resident of said Subdivision since February 2006; (c) affidavits of petitioner’s neighbors in Villa de Toledo attesting that petitioner has been a resident of said subdivision since February 2006; (d) certification of the barangay chairman of Barangay Balibago, Sta. Rosa, Laguna that petitioner is a resident of Villa de Toledo within the said barangay; (e) certificates of attendance of petitioner’s children in schools located in Sta. Rosa, Laguna since 2005; and (f) DTI certificates of business issued in the name of petitioner and his wife to show that they own and operate businesses in Sta. Rosa, Laguna since 2003.”

It also evaluated the evidence presented by Jesus against Dan:

1. “The fact that a few barangay health workers attested that they had failed to see petitioner whenever they allegedly made the rounds in Villa de Toledo is of no moment, especially considering that there were witnesses (including petitioner’s neighbors in Villa de Toledo) that were in turn presented by petitioner to prove that he was actually a resident of Villa de Toledo, in the address he stated in his COC. The law does not require a person to be in his home twenty-four (24) hours a day, seven days a week, in order to fulfill the residency requirement.”
2. “Neither do we find anything wrong if petitioner sometimes transacted business or received visitors in his Cabuyao house, instead of the alleged Sta. Rosa residence, as there is nothing in the residency requirement for candidates that prohibits them from owning property and exercising their rights of ownership thereto in other places aside from the address they had indicated as their place of residence in their COC.”

2. With respect to Dan’s contract of lease, the Court cited the case of Perez v. COMELEC where it held that “(t)he fact that a person is registered as a voter in one district is not proof that he is not domiciled in another district. Thus, in Faypon v. Quirino, this Court held that the registration of a voter in a place other than his residence of origin is not sufficient to consider him to have abandoned or lost his residence.”

It added that “although private respondent raised alleged formal defects in the contract of lease, the lessor himself testified that as far as he was concerned, he and petitioner had a valid contract and he confirmed that petitioner and his family are the occupants of the leased premises.”

The Court noted that “(t)he HRET puts undue emphasis on the fact that petitioner is only leasing a townhouse in Sta. Rosa while he owns houses in Pagsanjan and Cabuyao. His ownership of properties in other places has been taken to mean that petitioner did not intend to make Sta. Rosa his permanent residence or that he had not abandoned his domicile of origin.”  It stated that x x x ”there is nothing in the Constitution or our election laws which require a congressional candidate to sell a previously acquired home in one district and buy a new one in the place where he seeks to run in order to qualify for a congressional seat in that other district. x x x. To use ownership of property in the district as the determinative indicium of permanence of domicile or residence implies that only the landed can establish compliance with the residency requirement. This Court would be, in effect, imposing a property requirement to the right to hold public office, which property requirement would be unconstitutional.”

It added that:

“In our considered view, private respondent failed to discharge his burden of proof. Petitioner’s COCs for previous elections and his 2005 application for a driver’s license only proved that his domicile of origin was Pagsanjan, Laguna and it remained to be so up to 2005. x x x. To summarize, private respondent’s own evidence did not categorically establish where petitioner’s domicile is nor did said evidence conclusively prove that for the year prior to the May 14, 2007 petitioner had a domicile other than where he actually resided, i.e. Sta. Rosa, Laguna.”

It explained further that “the residency requirement is a means to prevent a stranger or newcomer from holding office on the assumption that such stranger or newcomer would be insufficiently acquainted with the needs of his prospective constituents. x x x.”

“Simply put,” said the Court, “petitioner could not be considered a “stranger” to the community which he sought to represent and that evil that the residency requirement was designed to prevent is not present in this case.”

Before it reversed and set aside the questioned decision of the HRET, the Court stated in clear terms:

“[When] a candidate has received popular mandate, overwhelmingly and clearly expressed, all possible doubts should be resolved in favor of the candidate’s eligibility for to rule otherwise is to defeat the will of the people. Above and beyond all, the determination of the true will of the electorate should be paramount. It is their voice, not ours or of anyone else, that must prevail. This, in essence, is the democracy we continue to hold sacred.” (Underscoring supplied.)