Pressure mounts on the Independent Commission for Infrastructure (ICI) to open its hearings to the public, with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. himself joining the calls of different stakeholders to promote more transparency in its investigations.
‘The President, in all instances, wants transparency. Every investigation must be transparent, with nothing hidden,’ Palace press officer Claire Castro said in a briefing on Wednesday.
‘However, how the ICI will carry this out – how it will make its proceedings public, how it will ensure transparency, and to what extent – that is up to the ICI. Still, the President continues to advocate for transparency in all investigations,’ she added.
When Marcos created ICI last month, he assured it would be fully independent and would not meddle with its work, especially on the way its three members would conduct hearings and investigations.
Castro said the President was not even asking for updates with the ongoing investigation of the ICI.
No approval needed
‘The reports are entirely in the hands of the ICI, and whatever recommendations they make will come from them alone as they do not need the President’s approval,’ she added.
The ICI, however, maintained its position of keeping its hearings in the flood control fiasco behind closed doors. ICI executive director Brian Keith Hosaka said it was the commission’s way to avoid ‘trial by publicity,’ and to not allow itself to be used for any political leverage or agenda by any individual or group.
Past and present lawmakers have been urging the ICI to open its hearings to the public to show Filipinos that there would be no coverup and its investigations on the flood control mess would not protect anyone. Despite their differences in many issues, the Catholic Church and the Filipino megachurch Iglesia ni Cristo – both politically influential religious institutions in the country – agreed that by ensuring transparency in the ICI’s proceedings and findings was the only way to restore public trust. Retired Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonio Carpio also called for the ICI to let the public have access to its hearings, warning that the body was ‘losing its credibility very fast.’
In an interview on dzBB on Wednesday, Carpio said he was ‘very suspicious’ of the ICI’s decision to make its hearings private, when even criminal trials of the courts were open to the public.
If the ICI was not amenable to live-streaming the hearings, similar to the congressional inquiries on the flood control projects, the media at least should be allowed to cover these.
‘Because of these closed door hearings, people will lose faith in that ICI. That’s the number one thing that they have to correct,’ Carpio said. Former Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales, who was also an SC justice, shared the same view, expressing doubts over the results of the ICI’s insistence to conduct its hearings in secrecy.
‘I don’t understand why. Because even the courts, sitting as courts, it’s open to the public. It’s only in the interest of morality and decency that the judge may conduct hearings in private,’ she told journalist Karen Davila in an interview.
Carpio-Morales also rebuffed ICI’s defense that it wanted to prevent trial by publicity and undue political pressure in keeping its hearings behind closed doors.
‘The mere fact that Congress or the Senate conducts hearings openly does not make them a trial by publicity. It is the ICI [members] who will decide, but their decision will only be recommendatory. It should be the Ombudsman who should do the investigating,’ she added.
Malacañang maintained that the ICI, and not the Office of the Ombudsman, should take the lead in investigating alleged anomalies in flood control projects and related infrastructure.
Delays in probe
Castro dismissed calls to abolish the ICI just because Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla was appointed as the next ombudsman.
While Remulla was familiar with the flood control projects under scrutiny, Castro rejected the idea that the ombudsman should conduct the investigation by itself, raising concerns about possible delays.
‘The ombudsman does not focus only on flood control projects. There are many cases that the Ombudsman needs to pay attention to. So, we do not see this as a reason to abolish or end the work of the ICI,’ she said.
Castro told critics: ‘Would they really want the Ombudsman alone to handle all of this? How long would it take for a single case to be resolved that way? That’s why there truly needs to be an independent commission that will focus on the issue.’ She added that the work of the ombudsman and the Department of Justice would be expedited once the ICI completed its document gathering and preliminary investigations into the anomalous flood control projects.