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A legislative solution aimed at breaking a deadlock between human rights victims of the Marcos regime and the Philippine government over the ill-gotten gains of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos is currently being worked out by congress, an official in Manila said yesterday.
Chairman Haydee Yorac of the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) said yesterday that besides winning a forfeiture case against the Marcos estate, payment to the 10,000 victims of martial law is also key to the release of the $700 million Marcos Swiss deposits now in escrow at the Philippine National Bank.
Yorac said the pending forfeiture case now on appeal before the Supreme Court is one of the two conditions imposed by the Swiss Federal Supreme Court for the release of the $540 million Marcos Swiss deposits in escrow PNB which by now had grown to $700 million from accrued interests.
"The other condition that the Swiss Supreme Court has imposed is that the human rights violation victims must also be attended to," Yorac said.
She pointed out that in the beginning there was "conceptual difficulty" on the need to pay the human rights abuse victims during the Marcos administration because the claimants, who obtained a $2.35 billion award, assumed that they were pushing for compensation from the Marcos estate.
"But we found a device to get around this conflict. We have drawn up a bill, which is now being considered in both houses of congress, which will enable the government to pay Marcos human rights violation victims up to $200 million," said Yorac.
She explained that the payment is being made to the martial law victims based on the Philippine state's responsibility to compensate victims of torture.
The bill sponsored by House of Representatives member, Etta Rosales, of the leftist Akbayan Party, also a torture victim during the Marcos regime, seeks to amend a land reform law to allocate part of the recoveries of the Marcos ill-gotten wealth to victims of human rights abuses during the Marcos administration.
Based on the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law (Carl), all proceeds from recovered Marcos assets will be used to finance land reform for the peasants.
Yorac hopes congress will soon approve the bill, now on second reading in congress.
However, Marcos' own daughter, Imee, a House of Representatives member, has raised objections to the bill.
The 10,000 martial law victims won a landmark judgement in a federal court jury in Hawaii in 1995. This was declared final and executory by both the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court in 1996 and 1997.
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