Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno said that she does not believe in the idea that lawyers make better presidents when it comes to improving the future of the country.
In her press conference last Thursday, August 25, Sereno said that a president with a law degree does not guarantee good leadership.
“There are good lawyers, there are good bad lawyers. There are good presidents, there are bad presidents. So is there a one-to-one correspondence? I don’t think so,” GMA News Online quoted the chief justice.
She added that a good presidency all boils down to character and competence.
“I think it really depends on character and competence more than anything. We can await for the end of President [Rodrigo] Duterte’s six-year term and you the public, not me, can make the judgment,” she said.
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The President served as a city prosecutor in Davao City and is the eight lawyer-president of the Philippines. He is the first since the late strongman Ferdinand Marcos, who used the Constitution to keep political dissent under wraps and declare Martial Law from 1972 to 1981. Marcos also stayed in power from 1965 to 1986, when he was forced out of his seat at the Malacañang Palace by the EDSA Revolution or People Power.
Duterte has also been accused by human rights groups of endorsing the killings of drug suspects in his war against drugs, although Malacañang has denied these accusations, pointing to the drug syndicates as the people behind the killings.
Duterte has repeatedly said in his speeches and press conferences that his experience as a lawyer and a prosecutor, he knows the law. In fact, in his inauguration speech on June 30, he said, “As a lawyer and a former prosecutor, I know the limits of the power and authority of the president.”
However, he has been called out on for allegedly violating the law, or misreading it. He was called out for violating the Constitutional rights of the five ‘narco-generals’ after he revealed their names and was corrected for assuming that at 70, he can no longer be jailed.
Sources: (gmanetwork.com, en.wikipedia.org)
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