RP rejects US court order over Marcos funds

RP rejects US court order over Marcos funds

Agence France-Presse, Manila

President Gloria Arroyo on Friday denounced a U.S. court order to stop the transfer of nearly US$700 million in Swiss bank funds formerly controlled by the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos to the Philippines government as an infringement of the country's sovereignty.

However, the former president's widow, Imelda Marcos, welcomed the ruling.

"Foreign courts cannot overturn our own Supreme Court. It is important to stress this principle of sovereignty as the supreme welfare of our people is at stake in this issue," Arroyo said in a statement on the Hawaii district court injunction.

"To invoke a foreign court's decision to enforce Philippine policy or jurisdiction is absurd and a travesty of justice itself."

The government's chief lawyer Solicitor General Alfredo Benipayo said: "We are not an American colony."

Press reports on Friday quoted a Sept. 2 order by U.S. District Judge Manuel Real barring the transfer of any assets of the Marcos estate worldwide without approval of the U.S. court.

The order is a result of a 1990s ruling by the U.S. court awarding nearly US$2 billion in damages against the Marcos estate over a class action suit filed by several thousand human rights victims of the Marcos regime.

The Swiss government last month authorized the release to the Manila government of the Marcos Swiss bank funds after the Philippine Supreme Court handed down a verdict in July awarding the funds to the Philippine government.

The funds, said to have been embezzled from state coffers during Marcos' 20-year rule, were frozen in 1986 following a popular revolt that ended his regime. Marcos died in exile in Honolulu in 1989.

The bank funds were later transferred to an escrow account in Manila to await a Philippine court ruling on their rightful ownership.

Commenting on the U.S. court ruling, Imelda Marcos said in a statement: "It is ironic that it took a court from a foreign land, in this case a U.S. court, to cite the lack of due process in the Philippines."

Arroyo last month pledged to use part of the Swiss bank funds to compensate the human rights victims.

She has urged Congress to pass amendments to a law that provided that all ill-gotten wealth recovered from the Marcos family and those of his cronies would be used to finance the implementation of the Philippines's 1987 agrarian reform law.

Arroyo has ordered that about eight billion pesos ($146.2 million) of the Swiss money be placed in escrow so that it could eventually be used to compensate the human rights victims.