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By William B. Depasupil Reporter
THE Supreme Court Third
Division’s ruling cancelling all mining contracts within the Diwalwal Gold Rush Area may have handed the
common ownership of Filipinos over natural resources to small groups
of “tribesmen.”
In a 37-page manifestation, with
an urgent appeal for referral of its case to the High Court en banc,
a paper manufacturing firm, the Picop Resources Inc., urged the
Court en banc to take a second look at November 29, 2006 ruling of
the High Court’s Third Division, which, it claimed, radically
altered long-standing principles of law and legal doctrines.
Meanwhile, the Court en banc has
already taken cognizance of the appeal of Southeast Mindanao Gold
Mining Corporation to deliberate and subsequently reverse the June
23, 2006 decision of the First Division that cancelled all mining
operations within the Diwalwal Gold Rush Area, which apparently
paved the way for Malacañang to negotiate a deal with controversial
Chinese firm, ZTE Corp. to conduct mining operations in the
8,100-hectare mine site.
It was Trade and Industry
Secretary Peter Favila who negotiated the ZTE deal in behalf of the
government.
Southeast Gold was prompted to
file a motion seeking to elevate the case to the High Court en banc
after the ZTE deal cropped up during the Senate investigation on the
controversial national broadband deal, which was supposed to be
undertaken also by the Chinese firm.
During the Senate probe, it was
revealed the government signed an agreement with ZTE for mining
operations in Diwalwal on July 12, 2006. The hasty move came barely
a month after a June 23, 2006 ruling by the High Court’s First
Division dismissed a suit by local firms pursuing their own mining
claims over the disputed mining site in Mindanao.
Picop said that aside from
seriously limiting the validity of presidential issuances, the said
ruling is also defective because it virtually grants to certain
individuals claiming to be part of an indigenous people’s group
“private rights” over forestlands, which are traditionally owned
by the state.
Otherwise, all development
programs of the government may be held hostage, even to groups of
armed men who can hide under the convenient mask of being part of an
indigenous cultural community, Picop said.
Picop warned that the decision
declaring the 1969 Contract with Presidential Warranty null and void
“opened up 12 million hectares of the country’s forest reserves,
40 percent of the country’s land area, to certificate of ancestral
domain titles where the above-listed government agencies have no
legal basis for jurisdiction, and may have the unintended
consequence of such areas being independent enclaves with their own
armed components.”
Picop lamented that the November
29, 2006 decision “had modified or reversed the doctrine or
principle of law established in earlier decisions of the Supreme
Court en banc that forest reserves cannot be the subject of private
appropriation.”
“This doctrine is premised on
the Regalian doctrine enshrined not only in 1935 and 1973
Constitution, but also in the 1987 Constitution, Article XII of
which provides that . . . All lands of the public domain, waters,
minerals, coal, petroleum and other mineral oils . . . forest or
timber . . . and other natural resources are owned by the State.
With the exception of agricultural lands, all other natural
resources shall not be alienated,” Picop stressed.
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