MANILA, Philippines – The Supreme Court (SC) has granted the petition seeking to declare null and void the party-list substitution of former Commission on Elections (Comelec) commissioner Rowena Guanzon in 2022.
In a decision made public on Wednesday, November 20, the SC granted the petition filed by Duterte Youth party-list led by its chairperson Ronald Cardema and former representative Ducielle Cardema. The SC said the Comelec committed grave abuse of discretion when it approved P3PWD’s submission of an entirely new list of nominees in June 2022, or a month after the polls.
“Comelec Minute Resolution No. 22-0774, dated June 15,2022 is declared NULL and VOID for having been issued with grave abuse of discretion insofar as it approved the substitution of the nominees of respondent P3PWD Party-List. The Court’s Temporary Restraining Order dated June 29,2022 is made PERMANENT,” the decision penned by Associate Justice Ricardo Rosario said.
The said Comelec resolution approved the withdrawal of the old nominees and the nomination of the new ones of P3PWD party-list. Guanzon was listed as the party-list’s first nominee, Rosalie Garcia as the second, Cherrie Belmonte-Lim as third nominee, and Donnabel Tenorio and Rodolfo Villar Jr. as fourth and fifth nominees, respectively.
The SC said that regulations imposed by the Comelec on the substitution of party-list nominees are “mandatory” even after the polls. The commission originally set a November 15, 2021 deadline for the submission of party-list nominees, when Guanzon was still part of the Comelec.
Apart from granting Duterte Youth’s petition, the SC also directed P3PWD to submit additional nominees, but prohibited it from renominating Guanzon and others for the duration of the 19th Congress.
Meanwhile, the High Court dismissed Guanzon’s countercharge for indirect contempt “for being procedurally defective.”
After Guanzon retired in February 2022, she started campaigning on behalf of P3PWD even though she was not yet the official nominee. It was only in June when the original nominees withdrew their papers, with Guanzon submitting her documents and being placed on the top of the list of nominees of the party-list group.
P3PWD and Guanzon had argued that the substitution deadline no longer applied after the election, but the High Court refuted this.
“If we were to deem rules and regulations on nominee substitution as directory after the elections, we would be negating the exceptional character of substituiion. In effect, substitution would become the rule rather than the exception and parties would hardly be incentivized to field nominees with bona fide intention to assume office, thus reducing elections to a mere sport where players may be substituted at will or on a whim,” the High Court said. – Rappler.com