PROF. MERLIN MAGALLONA, one of the Philippines’s leading experts in international law who led numerous studies on maritime issues pre-Unclos and later became a UP Law dean and Foreign Affairs undersecretary, has died.
The highly respected intellectual died peacefully in his sleep on New Year’s Day at the age of 87, according to lawyer Romel Bagares on Twitter.
The muted announcement of the passage of someone with Magallona’s body of works contrasted sharply with the enormity of their significance, and their impact on Philippine policy making through various decision points in the highest leadership levels.
Magallona, variously described as “Professor Magallona” or “Dean Magi” to UP Law students, also served as the Department of Foreign Affairs Undersecretary For Migrant Workers’ Affairs (OUMWA) for one and a half years in 2001-2002.
As OUMWA undersecretary, he pushed for the creation of an Overseas Filipino Bond and government-subsidized housing program for OFWs—which were supported and endorsed by his then DFA Secretary and Vice President Teofisto Guingona Jr.
Coincidentally, it was during his time as a DFA senior official when Malaysia and Indonesia took their territorial dispute over Pulau Ligitan and Pulau Sipadan to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). A fervent advocate of the Philippine claim over Sabah, Magallona spearheaded the effort to make an intervention before the ICJ. Ligitan and Sipadan are islands off Celebes Sea and part of the Philippine claim over Sabah.
The Court later denied the Philippine request for intervention, with a caveat that elated the professor—i.e., whatever “reasoning or interpretation of the treaties” the Court had made over Malaysian and Indonesian claims, the Philippine claim over Sabah “could not be affected.”
“Our objective was to protect the integrity of our historic title to Sabah. We have achieved that objective even if we were not allowed to intervene. So in spite of appearances, the decision of the International Court is really good news for us,” Magallona had said.
The Marxist-Leninist ideologies of Guingona and Magallona also grounded the DFA during the negotiations with the Americans for the Terms of Reference of the Visiting Forces Agreement. Although then President Arroyo had already given the imprimatur for American forces to make a comeback to the Philippines at the height of the war against terror following the 9/11 attacks, Guingona and Magallona insisted on caveats in the terms of reference that would protect the sovereignty of the Philippines. In the end, the TOR stated that the American troops who will be given immunity from criminal liability in the Philippines should only engage in “training exercises” and should not engage in direct combat.
However, Guingona’s stint as SFA was short-lived, and so did Magallona’s incumbency as a diplomat.
Post-retirement
Ambassador to The Netherlands J. Eduardo Malaya said even after his resignation from the DFA, the former UP law dean had been very supportive of the department, especially when it comes to treaties and international laws.
“He is a towering intellectual and a genuinely kind person,” Malaya said.
In 2011, when the DFA was working on the candidature of then Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago for a seat in the International Criminal Court, she was asked whom she prefers to write the draft for her lecture before UN delegates.
“Her (Defensor-Santiago’s) reply was that the only person she respected to come up with a draft was Merlin Magallona,” Malaya recalled.
Government officials would often use Magallona’s views and writings as standard, he added.
“His passing is a great loss to the law academe and the legal profession, particularly in the field of international law,” Malaya said. “Although we do not always share his politics, one thing is certain: no one can question his integrity.”
Magallona’s integrity was so solid that people in and out of government, here and abroad, took time to read all of the studies he undertook or led, especially in the 1980s when he headed the Institute of International Legal Studies (IILS) of the UP College of Law.
Prof. Roland Simbulan, one of those Magallona mentored, recalled that the IILS “and our Department of Social Sciences which I chaired co-sponsored several fora…on the issue of the US bases and nuclear weapons. Both of us were resource persons in these events. We also coauthored publications on the above issues.”
Simbulan recalled of Magallona’s intellectual discipline: “He was very meticulous, and used his wide knowledge of public international law to defend and pursue the country’s interests and sovereignty.”
A reporter who covered the UP and to whom Magallona gave updates of the studies they were doing recalled learning from the professor the “nose-bleed minutiae of maritime concepts and issues at a time when few Filipinos had the slightest idea of the Unclos,” or the United Convention on the Law of the Sea, adopted in 1982, and which the Philippines is a signatory of.
It was the Unclos that the Philippines leaned back on heavily when it brought its case against China’s “excessive claims” in the South China Sea before the arbitral tribunal in The Hague.
Legacy of UP Law dean
One of the UP students enrolled during Magallona’s term as dean recalled him fondly.
“Although I was not his student, he had a major role in my legal studies at the UP Law when I entered as a freshman in 1992 until I took the bar exams in 1998.
“Despite the fact that he was not my professor, I was able to understand the legal mind of Dean Magi, as we fondly called him, through his books, papers, and publications on international law,” said Dennis Gorecho, an expert on maritime law who writes a column for BusinessMirror.
“Encounters with law professors during the dreaded recitations involved answers that range from direct lifting from the SCRAs ‘in the original,’ for those who studied, to inventions through guess work for those who didn’t.Despite the torture, most of the memorable moments in law school were funny blunders during class recitations, as reminisced by some of his former students,” according to Gorecho.
He quoted Professor Theodore Te, who once served as Supreme Court spokesman, as saying: “He [Magallona] was, for the most part, the most bewildering and at the same time entertaining professor we ever had…because his ideas were so different from what we were reading in the assigned cases.”
Te added that “the forest is barer at the moment because a great tree has fallen. But the seeds he has sown have become fruitful and will soon produce many new trees to try and fill the void.”
Gorecho also quoted Professor Antonio La Vina as describing Dean Magi’s language as “dense…and not easy to understand” because of the ideas and the framework, “When we recited in his class, we really were not sure we understood what we were mouthing. And in his poker face, which was as calm as his voice, he did not give us a hint whether our answers were correct.”
In the landmark case of Magallona vs. the Executive Secretary (G.R No. 187167, August 16, 2011), Dean Magi led the petitioners questioning the constitutionality of Republic Act 9522, or “An Act to Define the Baselines of the Territorial Sea of the Philippines.”
Petitioners submit that RA 9522 “dismembers a large portion of the national territory” because it discards the pre-United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) III demarcation of Philippine territory under the Treaty of Paris and related treaties, successively encoded in the definition of national territory under the 1935, 1973 and 1987 Constitutions.”
Petitioners argued that this constitutional definition trumps any treaty or statutory provision denying the Philippines sovereign control over waters, beyond the territorial sea recognized at the time of the Treaty of Paris, that Spain supposedly ceded to the United States.
However, the Supreme Court upheld by a unanimous decision the amendment to the country’s archipelagic baselines to conform to the Unclos.
Magallona also served as a resource person for the constitutionality of the Bangsamoro Basic Law and pushed for the Philippines’ territorial sovereignty on multiple occasions.
While most intellectuals who constantly display their ideologies at every turn often end up distracting public focus away from hard, data-driven arguments on issues, Magallona, in Gorecho’s words, “made international law real and as a tool which allows smaller states to stand up to superpowers.” Reports by Malou Talosig-Bartolome and Lourdes M. Fernandez
