THE legal counsel of martial law human rights victims has chided the Philippine government, claiming that the biggest stumbling block for the compensation of the victims is the opposition from it and not from the Marcoses.

Robert Swift, the lawyer of some 9,539 Filipino human rights victims, in a three-page letter to President Benigno Aquino 3rd, urged the government, the family of the late strongman Ferdinand Marcos, together with the human rights victims to make a genuine effort to settle their differences “so that the Filipino victims of torture, summary execution and disappearance [and their heirs] may have compensation and closure during their lifetime.”

Swift disclosed that in 1995, he obtained a $2-billion judgment against the estate of Marcos following a decision of US Federal Court.

The US lawyer added that since then he had been pursuing to collect the judgment until he forged a settlement agreement with former president Joseph “Erap” Estrada and the Marcoses in 1999, “which would have given the victims $150 million from the over $684 million in Marcos Swiss assets.”

Swift, however, said that the settlement was a frustration after the Sandiganbayan declared that the agreement was unconstitutional.

The US lawyer lamented that for “the past ten years the chief opposition to collection of the judgment - and compensation of Filipino victims—has come from the Republic, not the Marcoses.”

Swift disclosed that by his estimate the government has spent over $10 million opposing the efforts of human rights victims “to recover Marcos/Arelma assets and Marcos/Singapore assets.”

Swift said that the government opposition was “palpable and terribly misguide” that it reached the US Supreme Court, wherein the government allegedly “used political pressure to overturn on procedural grounds a decision of the lower federal courts, which awarded the class $40 million of Marcos/Arelma assets.”

“By contrast, the chief justice of Singapore’s highest court, where $28 million is on deposit, rejected the very same procedural argument raised by the Republic in the United States. The litigation continues in both Singapore and New York as to these funds of money” Swift said.

Swift said that efforts of the human rights victims to obtain recognition of their US judgment in the Philippines have been frustrated by the Philippine courts.” He added that the trial for the case has been going on for the last 14 years with no end in sight.

“This immense delay led the United Nations Human Rights Committee in a 2007 decision to condemn the Republic for violating the internationally protected rights of the victims,” Swift said, adding that the “Republic has yet to implement the remedies required by the United Nations.”

Swift said that if no genuine effort to forge an agreement the Philippine government “will continue to combat the human rights victims incurring large cost and losing its moral mandate.”

He noted that the economic problems in the country, which has been exacerbated by the effect of worldwide recession but claimed that the misery of the human rights victims “is more severe because their poverty has lasted decades.”

“It is time, after 24 long years after Marcos fled the Philippines, that Class’ and the Republic’s differences with the Marcoses over the assets of the late President be resolved,” Swift said.

Swift, likewise, expressed belief that President Aquino will take into consideration on his proposal and could relate to the desperation and frustration of human rights victims during martial law, as he pointed out that the President’s father, the late sen. Benigno Aquino, was also a victim of summary execution.