Lawyer Jaime Ibañez, former law dean of Laguna State Polytechnic University, filed a Petition for Certiorari and Prohibition and asked the tribunal to nullify Republic Act 11469 or the Bayanihan to Heal as One Act on the grounds of being “partly unconstitutional in so far as the imposition in the country of the Enhanced Community Quarantine.”
He sought to prohibit the Inter-Agency Task Force on the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases from enforcing its guidelines on community quarantine, as these are supposedly an “invalid delegation of legislative authority” and in violation of due process and equal protection clauses.
“The IATF has no power to define the law on quarantine, set its own parameters and restrictions and to even invent the Modified Enhanced Community [Quarantine] according to its own bizarre definition, which all amount to an exercise of grave abuse of discretion,” the petition read.
In addition to this, Ibañez said in the petition that there is no declared congressional policy that would authorize a chief executive to restrict people’s movement.
“Locking or putting individuals who are not COVID-19 patients and the like, and placing them to quarantine area with unlimited period, is a complete disregard of the safeguards embodied in the bill of rights,” the petitioner further read.
Meanwhile, the country’s lawmakers are urgently deliberating to extend the Bayanihan law, and effectively President Rodrigo Duterte’s special powers, for another three months.
