angelic moo

I just finished an article by Nobue Suzuki entitled Outlawed Children: Japanese Filipino Children, Legal Defiance and Ambivalent Citizenships (Pacific Affairs, Volume 83, Number 1, March 2010, pp. 31-50) which chronicled the legal battle waged by children born of Japanese men and Filipino women to acquire Japanese citizenship. Japanese law restricted citizenship in these cases only if the father acknowledged paternity before the child is born or if the parents were to marry . In 2008, the Supreme Court of Japan declared this law unconstitutional for being discriminatory. Suzuki writes that this is only the 7th time in its history that the Court had declared a law unconstitutional. I am amazed that the Court demonstrated a willingness to strike down a decades-old law to right what they perceived to be a wrong foisted upon innocents. It stands in contrast to the plight of comfort women in the Philippines who were recently told by the Supreme Court of the Philippines that they " appe...

The Philippine Supreme Court, which is presently examining the charges of plagiarism in the case of Vinuya v. Executive Secretary , cannot resolve the issue without demanding the resignation of its ponente, Associate Justice Mariano del Castillo. With the international legal community looking on the Court cannot sweep this issue aside and say there was no plagiarism--there clearly was--and that the US sources used in the decision were incorrectly applied--because they were. The authors have protested the misuse of their scholarship to further ends that they do not support: the absence of recourse to international law remedies for victims of sexual abuse during the Second World War. If the Court sanctions these shortcomings, it informs the world that the victims of Japanese occupation during World War II have no legal recourse according to plagiarized and misinterpreted sources. Nothing could be so appalling and dishonorable. Justice del Castillo's resignation is necessary to sav...

The faculty of the UP College of Law will come out with a statement on the allegations of plagiarism against the Supreme Court in the case of Vinuya v. Executive Secretary (G.R. No. 162230, April 28, 2010). The statement will carry my sentiments so there is no need for me to elaborate on my position here. I add only a few thoughts: I cringe at the thought that at some point in the future, the works of the judiciaries of the world will be compiled and examined to see what States do to vindicate the rights of their citizens. In that collection, the Philippines will offer a Supreme Court decision saying that comfort women who were raped by invading Japanese soldiers during the Second World War "appear to be without a remedy to challenge those that have offended them before appropriate fora." That decision will be founded on plagiarized works, that in fact argued the exact opposite: that these victims do have remedies under international law. The Supreme Court should take...