THE Court of Appeals has sustained its decision denying the petition of the victims of the martial law regime of President Ferdinand Marcos seeking to enforce a ruling of a United States court awarding them about $2 billion in damages.
The court, through Associate Justice Normandie Pizarro, denied the motion for reconsideration filed by a group of human rights victims, saying there was a lack of new or substantial matter that would warrant a reversal or modification of its July 7, 2017 decision.
In earlier decision, the court held that the judgment promulgated by the Hawaii District Court in 1995 was not binding because that court had no jurisdiction over the case.
“To our minds, the failure of the final judgment to meet the standards of what a valid judgment is in our country compels us to deny its enforcement,” the court said.
“Rules of comity should not be made to prevail over our Constitution and we cannot allow foreign impositions to trample upon our sovereignty.”
The appellate court’s decision upheld the ruling of a Makati City Regional Trial Court that dismissed the complaint filed by Priscilla Mijares, Loretta Ann Rosales, Hilda Narciso Sr., Mariani Dimaranan and Joel Lamangan on their behalf and on behalf of the 10,000 human rights victims during the Marcos regime in the US case or Class Action No. MDL 840.
The appellate court said the Hawaii District Court certified the suit as a class suit, which should mean that the parties who filed the case both for themselves and those they sought to represent shared a common legal interest.
But it said the final judgment of the Hawaii court that sought to be enforced in the Philippines, the claimants were classified into three subclasses: torture, summary execution and disappearance victims.
The court said such classification of the claimants was an obvious recognition that “no common question of law and fact exists between/among the claimants.
“In other words, each claimant in MDL 840 had a right, if any, only to the damage that such individual may have suffered, and not one of them had any right to or can claim any interest in the damage or injury which another suffered. Hence, MDL 840 was not and should not have been brought as a class suit.”