By MIKHA FLORES
FOR the past 12 years, the Commission on Elections was guided by a Supreme Court decision describing the party-list system as a “social justice tool”. The system was designed not just to give more laws for the protection of marginalized groups but to enable them to become lawmakers themselves.
But with the April 5, 2013 Supreme Court decision setting six new parameters for party-list accreditation, the high court, in effect, reversed its own rules and came up with new ones it says are based on the original intent of the framers of the system.
In 2001, former Chief Justice Artemio Panganiban penned Ang Bagong Bayani-OFW Labor Party vs. Comelec, a landmark decision that set guidelines in accrediting party-list organizations and in choosing the nominees who will sit in Congress as party-list representatives.
