There’s an old Charlie Chan joke that goes, the detective was looking at the body of a stab victim and observed, “ah, so, the clot thickens.”
Senate President Franklin Drilon who was a former Secretary of Justice, has observed that the birth certificate of Fernando Poe Jr. and his parent’s marriage certificate -both submitted by FPJ’s lawyers and not the National Archives director- indicates that FPJ’s parents married over a year after his birth.
Drilon says that this means that FPJ was born illegitimate, which, according to the commonly bruited-about opinion in legal circles, means FPJ, at birth, under the law posessed the citizenship of his mother. So FPJ by this reasoning was born an American citizen.
The question, says Drilon, is whether by his parent’s subsequent marriage, the presumption can be made that not only was FPJ legitimized, but that ex post facto FPJ’s citizenship was then affected, rendering him a natural-born Filipino citizen. It will be interesting to see what the lawyers have to say about this.
Apparently then, the whole issue isn’t going to go away anytime soon.
This has been pushed to the SC by the COMELEC in any case, but Drilons premise that FPJ would assume US citizenship is wrong.
US requirements ot the time dicate Poe would have had to live in the States for a period of 5 years to assume the mothers citienship. So far I’ve not seen any evidence of that.
The reference can be found here:
http://www.aca.ch/hisuscit.htm
Just to play devil’s advocate, sincethe game has been started, I feel it should be decided upon by the courts, since at least it will lay all future issues to rest.
MLQ–Surely the 1935 Commonwealth Consitution has something to say about the status of a person born in 1939:
ARTICLE IV
Citizenship
Section 1. The following are citizens of the Philippines:
(1) Those who are citizens of the Philippine Islands at the time of the adoption of this Constitution.
(2) Those born in the Philippine Islands of foreign parents who, before the adoption of this Constitution, had been elected to public office in the Philippine Islands.
(3) Those whose fathers are citizens of the Philippines.
(4) Those whose mothers are citizens of the Philippines and, upon reaching the age of majority, elect Philippine citizenship.
(5) Those who are naturalized in accordance with law.
—
Tell me, sir, what part of Paragraph (3) does not apply to Mr. Fernando Poe, Jr.?
Notice also that Par. (3) does NOT say “Those whose fathers are citizens of the Philippines AND who are legitimately married to their mothers.”
The principle that Drilon and others pronounce as “…following the citizenship of the mother…” can’t apply to FPJ since the identify of his father was always known.