Sotto eyes revamp of party list system
Saying the country’s party list system has become the “very evil” that the Constitution sought to prevent, Senate Minority Leader Vicente Sotto III urged his colleagues to support his proposal to realign the system with its original intent.
Sotto said he has filed a bill to amend the 30-year-old Republic Act No. 7941, known as the Party-List System Act signed in 1995, to realign the system with its original intent to truly represent the marginalized and the underrepresented.
“Through the years, the interpretation of the law on party-list has expanded its qualification and has deviated from the intent of the framers of the 1987 Constitution,” Sotto said in the explanatory note of his proposed Senate Bill No. 192.
“The party-list system has also been abused and used as a vehicle to pursue advocacies that are not for the best interest of the government.” he added.
The measure outlined additional grounds for the cancellation of registration of party list groups, including failure to represent the marginalized and underrepresented sectors, instances where members or nominees do not belong to these sectors, direct or indirect participation in acts detrimental to the best interest of the government, ceasing to be a marginalized sector and material misrepresentation of nominees.
Sotto emphasized that the deviation from the true mandate of the party list system has instead created more inequality, the “very evil” that the framers of the Constitution sought to prevent.
“Amid the many issues hounding government officials, it is high time to revisit the true purpose of the party-list system, whether these groups are genuinely representing the marginalized, or merely hiding behind the guise of doing so for personal or political gain,” he said.
Correcting a correction
If passed, Sotto said the measure would strengthen the integrity of the party list system, ensuring that it fulfills its intended purpose, to uplift the voices of the marginalized and underrepresented in Philippine society.
The Philippine party list system was established by the 1987 Constitution via Section 5, Article VI, which mandates that the House of Representatives shall be composed of not more than 250 members, with 20 percent of these seats allocated to party list representatives elected through a system of registered national, regional, and sectoral parties or organizations.
During 1986, in the Constitutional Commission, the system was envisioned to ensure representation for marginalized and underrepresented sectors in the House of Representatives.
But in 2013, the Supreme Court issued its own definition of the country’s party list system and ruled that political parties do not have to represent the marginalized sector to participate in the party list elections.
In a decision penned by then Justice Antonio Carpio, the high court ruled: “National parties or organizations and regional parties or organizations do not need to organize along sectoral lines and do not need to represent ‘any marginalized and underrepresented’ sector.”
