MANILA – President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has completed the 15-member Supreme Court (SC) with her appointment of a senior member of the Court of Appeals as the latest SC associate justice, a Malacanang official announced.
Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita said the latest appointee, Senior Associate Justice Jose Mendoza of the appellate court, filled the SC vacancy left by Justice Minita Chico-Nazario who retired on December 5.
SC spokesman lawyer Midas Marquez reported that Mendoza took his oath before Chief Justice Reynato Puno on Tuesday.
With Mendoza‘s appointment, the tribunal is now known as the “Arroyo Supreme Court†because the President has appointed 14 of its 15 members since she took over Malacanang in 2001 following the ouster of then president Joseph Estrada.
SC records show that the only SC member not appointed by President Arroyo is Puno who was named associate justice by then president Fidel Ramos.
However, the same records show that it was President Arroyo who appointed Puno as chief justice on December 6, 2006. He is to retire in May this year when he reaches the mandatory retirement age of 70.
Concerned sectors have expressed fear that President Arroyo would pack the High Court with her allies to “shield†her from the criminal and civil suits that would be filed against her, including plunder, when she steps down from Malacanang on June 30, 2010.
For his part, Ermita said the President chose Mendoza from a list of at least five nominees submitted to Malacanang by the Judicial and Bar Council (JBC), chaired by the chief justice.
The JBC has been established by the 1986 Constitution and is mandated to go over the list of applicants and nominees to fill vacant positions in the SC and the appellate court, including background checks and personal interviews.
Ermita disclosed that President Arroyo earlier picked from the same list and appointed on Christmas Eve Jose Perez, the SC court administrator, as SC associate justice to replace Justice Leonardo Quisumbing who retired on November 6.
Both Perez and Mendoza hail from Batangas province in Southern Luzon but Ermita, himself a native of Batangas, did not see anything wrong in their appointment to the High Court.
Ermita pointed that both Perez and Mendoza are highly qualified and known among their peers as independent-minded for the SC position since they passed all the requirements imposed for appointment to the High Court.
Otherwise, their names would not have been included in the list submitted by the JBC to Malacanang, he argued.
Mendoza became known for issuing the writs of “habeas corpus†(literally, produce the bodies), which were sought by the families of two women students of the state-owned University of the Philippines who were reportedly abducted by the military in 2006.
While at the appellate court, Mendoza was also the justice who revered the decision of a trial court junking the criminal charges against businessman Dante Tan, an ally of Estrada, who was implicated in a stock manipulation controversy.
But Tan fled the country and is now believed to be hiding in Australia after Estrada’s ouster by the Edsa 11 People Power Revolution in January 2006.
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