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By Angelo S. Samonte Reporter
Romulo Neri, former chief of the
National Economic and Development Authority, told senators that he
reported the alleged P200-million bribe offer to the President, but
he invoked executive privilege when asked about details of what she
said.
Neri would only say that
President Gloria Arroyo told him over the telephone not to accept
the bribe supposedly offered by Chairman Benjamin Abalos of the
Commission on Elections.
For a brief moment, senators
discussed whether Neri actually had the right to invoke that. Sen.
Alan Peter Cayetano, who chairs the blue-ribbon committee, commented
that executive privilege is limited to the President and the
Executive Secretary, who is sometimes referred to as “the little
president.”
But Neri insisted that Executive
Secretary Eduardo Ermita had told him he could invoke executive
privilege, and that prevented him from detailing what the President
said about the alleged bribe.
Ermita himself echoed this. He
said the Office of the President could provide Neri a letter to that
effect as a formality.
“Secretary Neri may request for
it from the President, and we’ll make a letter so that it is
properly documented,” Ermita said Wednesday.
But what is executive privilege?
According to the Black’s Law
dictionary, “Executive privilege is a privilege based on the
constitutional doctrine of separation of powers, exempting the
executive from disclosure requirements applicable to the ordinary
citizen or organization where such exemption is necessary to the
discharge of highly important executive responsibilities involved in
maintaining governmental operations, and extends not only to
military and diplomatic secrets but also to documents integral to an
appropriate exercise of the executive’s domestic decisional and
policy making functions, that is, those documents reflecting the
frank expression necessary in intra-governmental advisory and
deliberative communications.”
Another simpler definition states
that executive privilege is the power of the government to withhold
information from the public, the courts, and the Congress.
Executive privilege is not new in
the Philippine legal system and has been used even before the
promulgation of the 1987 Constitution. And being of American origin,
it is best understood in light of how it has been defined and used
in the legal literature of the United States.
Executive privilege is,
nonetheless, not a clear or unitary concept. It has encompassed
claims of varying kinds. But reports have it that executive
privilege—whether asserted against Congress, the courts or the
public—is recognized only in relation to certain types of
sensitive information, like matters of national security.
While executive privilege is a
constitutional concept, a claim may be valid or not depending on the
grounds invoked to justify it and the context in which it is made.
The Supreme Court discussed this
privilege when it ruled on the controversial Executive Order 464,
after President Arroyo issued it in September 2005. That is the
reason given Palace officials for not attending congressional
hearings.
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