SPEAKER Pantaleon Alvarez on Tuesday said his proposal for a law on dissolution of marriage would help strengthen the bond between spouses and was consistent with the constitutional mandate to protect the family as a basic social institution.
“This measure will strengthen family bond… because when couples get married, both parties will now be obliged to make the other party happy,” Alvarez told a media interview.
Alvarez said under his proposal unhappiness of either party over the marital union would be recognized as a ground for the dissolution of marriage.
He also cited complaints of many female Overseas Filipino Workers that while they were trying to earn abroad to send money to their family, their husbands took on another partner.
Because of the existing laws on family relations, Alvarez said the annulment process was adversarial and the party seeking annulment should prove the partner was not fit to contract marriage.
Besides, he said the process was not only long but also very costly.
“This is why I am pushing this bill to address the plaints of many. There are many couples who are at odds against each other and they want to end their marital union,” he said in Filipino, short of providing figures on how many married couples were on the verge of breaking up.
Alvarez said the state should make it easier to separate couples whose marriages were on the rocks and whose relationships were already irreconcilable.
Alvarez, as a lawyer, said he had many women clients who had sought his counsel for annulment of marriage due to various complaints against their husbands.
Most common among these complaints was that the husband was jobless and did nothing to support the family, according to Alvarez.
He did not mention anything about men, on the other hand, working with their wives being jobless—for purposes of statistical comparison.
He said that under his proposal, the process for the dissolution of marriage would start with the filing before the court a joint petition of the couple.
The petition should include the agreement of the couple on the custody of the children and their support, as well as the sharing in the division of their properties.
As a safeguard, Alvarez said the judge would determine if there was no coercion from either of the parties for the dissolution of the union.
There was no mention on how many marriages have been annulled by the civil courts nor by the Catholic Church.
Neither was there any mention on how much would be spent by anyone who initiated an annulment proceedings—either with the civil courts or with the Catholic Church.