Miriam Defensor-Santiago faces battle of her life

Former judge and legal scholar is also the author of over 30 books, including the best-selling joke book, Stupid is Forever

Last updated: February 10, 2016 | 10:15

8 MIN READ

Manila: It's been nearly two years since Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago declared she is battling stage 4 cancer.

Now, Santiago is battling her way to the Philippines' top elected post for the second time around (she first ran for president in 1992, but lost to retired General Fidel V Ramos.

In June 2015, Santiago said she was seeking a “miracle” cure from cancer. Four months later, in October, she declared her run for the presidency, with Ferdinand Marcos Jr as her running mater for Vice President.

Santiago is running rnder the People's Reform Party (PRF), which she organised to launch her first presidential bid in 1992. After she lost in the 1992 presidential elections that saw former General Fidel Ramos as president, Santiago's camp alleged that that election marred by allegations of "impropriety by the victor".

She is currently trailing in opinion polls in the runup to the May 2016 vote.

Credentials

Santiago has formidable credentials as an academic, has a colourful career as a judge and civil servant and stands tall in the international legal community.

Having served in all three branches of the Philippine government – judicial, executive, and legislative – Santiago gained prominence after she headed the once-corrupt Bureau of Immigration and Deportation during which she claimed to have eaten "death threats for breakfast".

The Senator from Iloilo was named one of "The 100 Most Powerful Women in the World in 1997" by The Australian magazine. In 1988, she was named laureate of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for government service, with a citation “for bold and moral leadership in cleaning up a corrupt-ridden government agency.” She also earned numerous awards, including Spain's Grand Cross of the Order of Civil Merit (November 30, 2007)

In 2012, she became the first Filipina and the first Asian from a developing country to be elected a judge of the International Criminal Court. She later resigned the post, citing chronic fatigue syndrome, which turned out to be lung cancer.

In 2016, Santiago was invited to be part of the International Advisory Council of the International Development Law Organization (IDLO), an intergovernmental body that promotes the rule of law.

She has also written books covering topics in law and the social sciences. She has served three terms in the Philippine Senate.

Upbringing

Santiago, the eldest in a brood of seven, was born in Iloilo City to a judge and a dean. She was a child prodigy, winning the high school spelling bee as a freshman and then for the next three years. She graduated valedictorian in grade school, high school, undergraduate school, and law school in the elite University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman campus.

In 1965, Santiago graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science, magna cum laude from the University of the Philippines Visayas. After graduation, she was elected to the Pi Gamma Mu and Phi Kappa Phi honor societies.

Santiago proceeded to the UP College of Law, where was champion in numerous oratorical contests and debates. She completed her Bachelor of Laws, cum laude. She became the first female editor of the student newspaper, The Philippine Collegian.

Santiago went on a fellowship to the US, and earned the degrees Master of Laws and Doctor of Juridical Science degrees at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She finished both degrees in a period of only one-and-a-half years.

Following school, she took a position as special assistant to the justice secretary. She also taught political science at the Trinity University of Asia. She was law professor at the University of the Philippines, teaching evening classes for some ten years.

She has studied at several universities, including Oxford and Harvard law summer schools; Cambridge; and The Hague Academy of International Law. She earned the degree Master of Religious Studies (without thesis) at the Maryhill School of Theology.

In Oxford, she was a Research Fellow at St. Hilda’s College. She also took a summer program in law at St. Edmund’s Hall, Oxford. At Cambridge, she was a Research Fellow at the Lauterpacht Research Centre for International Law.

In 1970, she married Narciso Yap Santiago. They had two sons, but one died in college. They have five grandchildren.

Career

After a stint of ten years at the justice department, Santiago served as Legal Officer of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees at Geneva, Switzerland. She was assigned to the Conferences and Treaties Section. She became skilled at treaty negotiation and drafting. She resigned her position when her father in the Philippines developed prostate cancer.

Santiago was appointed judge of the Regional Trial Court of Quezon City, Metro Manila by former President Ferdinand Marcos. She was the youngest judge appointed to Metro Manila. Further, she was exempted from the practice of first serving as a judge outside Metro Manila.

As RTC judge, she quickly proclaimed a “no postponement” policy. At that time, cases were tried in segments that were usually a month apart, resulting in trials that took years to finish. Lawyers were prone to seek postponement of trial. As a result, trial judges scheduled ten or fifteen cases a day, so that they could make up for cases postponed.

Santiago scheduled only five cases a day, and heard each case, and disposed of the highest number of cases in her first year in office.

She became nationally famous when she issued perhaps the first decision to rule against Martial Law, authored by the man who appointed her judge.

At that time, alleged illegal public assemblies were declared as crimes and were punishable by death. A large group of activist students from the UP and Ateneo de Manila, as well as activists in the film industry, staged a rally in a central business district, and denounced the First Lady for her excesses.

To retaliate, Marcos issued a Preventive Detention Action order which authorised the military to hold suspects indefinitely, without bail. The students faced the dire prospect of missing their final exams and, for many of them, missing graduation.

Santiago suspended hearings on all other pending cases, and conducted whole-day trials. She ordered the military to allow the students to post bail. After promulgating her decision at the end of the day, Santiago drove herself to the state university, where she was teaching law.

The Philippine Jaycees, the Philippine Lions, and the YMCA Philippines all gave her awards for judicial excellence.

Politics

After martial law, in 1988, President Corazon Aquino appointed Santiago as Commissioner of Immigration and Deportation. At that time, the Commission was one of the most corrupt government agencies in Southeast Asia. Santiago declared the Philippines as “the fake passport capital of the world,” and directed raids against criminal syndicates, including the Yakuza.

She filled the CID detention center with alien criminals, and ordered construction of another detention centre. She extended to legal aliens protection from widespread extortion by requesting President Aquino to issue an executive order that authorized the “alien legalisation program.”

She received serious death threats, but proclaimed: “I eat death threats for breakfast.”

As a member of the House of Representatives, she delivered a privilege speech about her raids against paedophile communities in Central Luzon ran by expatriate paedophiles. Santiago responded by calling him “fungus face.”

The Rockefeller Foundation named her a laureate of the Magsaysay Award for government service – “for bold and moral leadership in cleaning up a graft-ridden government agency." The Magsaysay Award is the Asian equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

President Corazon Aquino promoted Santiago to member of her Cabinet, as secretary of the Secretary of Agrarian Reform.

Under a controversial law passed by Congress and signed by President Aquino, all agricultural landholdings were taken by the government and divided among the farmers. Each landowner was allowed to keep only five hectares, and each farmer received three hectares. Payment was in the form of bonds distributed through the Land Bank.

To subvert the law, big landowners applied for re-conversion of their agricultural land as commercial, residential, or industrial. The process became the widespread “conversion scandal of agrarian reform.”

The DAR officials themselves were the biggest culprits, because they sold conversion permits for bribes on a market rate set at certain amounts per hectare involved in the conversion.

Santiago stopped the conversion scandal, and appeased the landowners by enhancing the incentives for voluntary offers by the landowners for the sale of their landholdings, which entitled them to an additional five percent cash payment.

When asked if the hacienda belonging to the president’s family should be covered by agrarian reform, Santiago replied that the family’s hacienda should be distributed among the farmers. Shortly thereafter President Aquino accepted Santiago’s resignation.

Election

Santiago organised the People's Reform Party (PRP) and ran with a senatorial ticket during the 1992 presidential campaign.

While campaigning on April 28, 1991, Santiago was severely injured in car crash, which she described as an assassination attempt. She was wearing a white bush jacket, which became splattered with blood that gushed from a wound in her head.

On orders of President Aquino, she was airlifted from Tarlac to a Manila hospital. She underwent surgery on the jaw, and at one point a Catholic priest administered the last rites of the dying. Two months later, she was back on the campaign trail.

Santiago was leading the canvassing of votes for the first five days. Following a string of power outages, the tabulation concluded, and Ramos was declared president-elect. Santiago filed a protest before the Supreme Court as electoral tribunal, citing the power outages during the counting of votes as evidence of massive fraud. Her election protest was eventually dismissed on a technicality.

The public outrage over the presidential results prompted Newsweek to feature her and her rival on the cover with the question: “Was the Election Fair?” In another cover story, Philippines Free Press magazine asked: “Who’s the Real President?”[1]

Senate

She was first elected senator in 1995. During her three terms, she served as chair mostly of the foreign relations committee and the constitutional amendments committee. She was elected as official candidate of her People's Reform Party, hence she also served as chair of the foreign affairs committee of the Commission on Appointments.

Laws authored

Some of the laws she authored or helped craft include the Reproductive Health Act of 2012, The "Sin Tax" Law, Climate Change Act of 2009, Renewable Energy Act of 2008, Philippine Act on Crimes Against International Humanitarian Law, Magna Carta of Women, Cybercrime Act of 2012 and the Archipelagic Baselines Act of 2009.

2016 election campaign

In October 2015, Santiago declared her run for presidency in the 2016 Philippine presidential elections. She later confirmed that Senator Bongbong Marcos would serve as her running mate for Vice President.

Writings

Santiago has written at least 30 books, many of which are about law and social sciences. Among her works is the Code Annotated Series Project 2000, a series of books about laws passed by the Philippine Congress and Supreme Court decisions. The Code Annotated Series is the main part of Santiago's Legal Outreach Program.

During her initial battle with cancer, she continued to work on the 2014 edition of all her law books. These were published as the 2015 edition of her Code Annotated Series, by Rex Bookstore.

The doctoral dissertation Santiago wrote for the University of Michigan was published as a book named Political Offences in International Law. Santiago has also written two autobiographies, Inventing Myself and Cutting Edge: The Politics of Reform in the Philippines.

Santiago also published a joke book in 2014 entitled Stupid is Forever, a collection of jokes, comebacks, one-liners, and pick-up lines she used in speeches A sequel entitled Stupid is Forevermore was published a year later. Both books were published by ABS-CBN Publishing. The first book was named the best-selling book of 2014, selling about 110,000 copies in one month.

Miriam Defensor Santiago

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