Children’s rights advocacy groups on Sunday lambasted those who “seek to marginalize foundlings,” saying abandoned children should not be denied of the basic right to have a nationality and the aspiration to serve the country.
Lawyer Arpee Santiago, director of the Ateneo Law School‘s Human Rights Center, said that “a foundling need not do anything to acquire his or her citizenship. Thus, falls under their requirement of the Constitution.”
“This interpretation is consistent with the best interest of the child under the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Statelessness Convention,” Santiago said.
Celia Capadocia-Yangco, former Undersecretary of the Department of Social Welfare and Development, also said that in her 45 years of working as a civil servant and career executive service officer in the DSWD, she never had any doubts regarding the citizenship of foundlings as the Philippine Constitution upholds the rights of all children.
“I have known that the right to Philippine citizenship is a fundamental human right of all children, foundlings included,” Capadocia-Yangco, who was also once DSWD acting secretary, said in a statement.
“All children did not ask to be born. But once born, they have the right to a name, a nationality, a family, and to all other rights that will redound to their full development as human beings,” she said.
The citizenship of a foundling was placed under scrutiny when Rizalito David, a defeated 2013 senatorial candidate, filed a disqualification case against Senator Grace Poe before the Senate Electoral Tribunal.
According to David, Poe is not qualified to be a senator because as a foundling, whose parents were unknown, she is not a natural-born Filipino citizen.
However, the children’s rights groups stressed that abandoned children have the right against discrimination under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and enjoy the fundamental constitutional right to equal protection.
The groups also said that doctors, lawyers, accountants, architects and other professionals, who happen to be foundlings at birth, may be stripped of their licenses, because of the “short-sightedness of a narrow-minded few.”
“We have an obligation to be on the side of the child who needs protection,” Ma. Paz De Guzman, of the Parenting Foundation of the Philippines, said.