Law of Duterte Land | With Lian Buan

From July 2016 to December 2021, 427 human rights defenders were killed, 2,807 arrested, 1,161 jailed, and 1,367 raided, according to data from human rights group Karapatan. That sums up the war that President Rodrigo Duterte waged against dissent.

In this episode, justice reporter Lian Buan talks to lawyer Jobert Pahilga of Sentro para sa Tunay na Repormang Agraryo (SENTRA) on what it was like to be a dissenter during the last six years of the Duterte administration, and their outlook for president-elect Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.

President Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody war on drugs was unconstitutional, said retired supreme court senior justice Antonio Carpio, adding it’s the one policy of the last six years “that should be redressed.”

In this episode of Law of Duterte Land, we discuss estate tax more extensively with tax lawyer Jean Francois “Punch” Rivera III, the assistant national treasurer of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP).

Ferdinand 'Bongbong' Marcos Jr.’s spokesman Vic Rodriguez continues to insist that the case is pending, even though Supreme Court records show that the 1997 ruling is final and unappealable, and became executory in 1999. Rodriguez said it’s because there are still pending ill-gotten wealth cases, even though the Supreme Court in 1997 already said they have no bearing on the assessment. Both the BIR and the Department of Finance confirmed trying to collect from the Marcoses to no avail.

How come a powerful family is able to go on without paying this much tax?

With so much confusion and misinformation about the unpaid P203-billion estate tax of the Marcoses, we digest the issue with a taxation law expert in the easiest way possible.

In this episode, Rappler justice reporter Lian Buan talks with lawyer Mickey Ingles, who teaches tax law at Ateneo Law School and who authored the book 'Tax Made Less Taxing'.

In this episode of the Law of Duterte Land podcast, Lian Buan speaks to Fernando Peñarroyo, Integrated Bar of the Philippines' presidential adviser on energy, who said that for the group, it is more sound for the government to instead take up the 90% shares of Shell and Chevron instead of allow it to be transferred to Dennis Uy's subsidiaries.

Amid a pandemic, joblessness, and sinking economy, will Filipinos care about killings in the drug war when they fill in their ballot in May 2022? Rappler's Lian Buan talks to Filipino lawyer Perfecto "Boyet" Caparas about human rights as an election agenda.

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The anti-graft court Sandiganbayan recently ordered the Royal Traders Holding Co. Inc to pay the Philippine government around P1 billion in Marcos ill-gotten wealth. So, where to find that money, and all the other loot? How has the PCGG been doing it, and what remained as the challenges all throughout these years?

In this episode, Lian Buan talks to international lawyer Ruben Carranza who was PCGG commissioner from 2001 to 2004. Carranza was involved in the landmark 2003 ruling where the Supreme Court declared as ill-gotten $658 million worth of Marcos Swiss deposits.

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Is it time for the Philippines to pass its own memory law that would prohibit denial of the atrocities of the Marcosian martial law?

Lawyers Raphael Pangalangan, Gemmo Fernandez and Ross Tugade discussed it in their 2018 paper "Marcosian Atrocities: Historical Revisionism and the Legal Constraints on Forgetting." They sit down with Lian Buan in this episode of Law of Duterte Land podcast.

Now that the ICC's Office of the Prosecutor has been authorized to seek evidence to potentially request a warrant of arrest for President Rodrigo Duterte's drug war and the Davao City killings, what happens then? Lian Buan talks to Filipino international human rights lawyer Emerlynne Gil, the deputy regional director for research of Amnesty International.

Listen to this episode as we unpack how the justice system, for all its good intentions of due process for all, has fueled the culture against impunity