A Dis-Integrated Bar? Alvin T.

Claridades January 3, 2012

In its Dec. 22, 2011 issue, the Inquirer carried the story Corona impeachment rap flawedIBP. Five days later, the same paper headlined: Corona impeachment healthy for democracy, say 5 ex-IBP presidents. As if these news articles were not enough, the two groups even paid for full-page ads in the Inquirer last week detailing their respective positions on the issue. It is indeed troubling, if not downright disturbing, to see the Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP) and its former officers and members getting dragged in the middle of the brewing political controversy that is hounding its primus inter pares member, Chief Justice Corona. Troubling in the sense that the Association which is supposed to be an apolitical and neutral aggrupation of lawyers has unnecessarily thrown itself into the fray, donning a position that evidently does not sit well with many of its members, and placing itself into a potentially divisive collision course with its leading members. Disturbing because the IBP henceforth can no longer be expected to be fair and impartial owing to its board of national officers having taken an early official position on a case involving one of its elite members with apparently little consultation with at least its former officers. The seeming crack on this mandatory organization (lawyers are obliged to be IBP members upon signing the roll of attorneys with no option not to do so) has manifested itself clearly in the said ads which carried diametrically opposing claims and positions between the incumbent IBP officers, on the one hand, and former IBP officers, on the other. It is, therefore, not far-fetched that when the billows of smoke of the unfolding impeachment drama have vanished in the air, more than CJ Corona, it will be the IBP that will emerge as the more badly beaten and bruised actor. Given those facts, it is high time that Congress review the statutory powers conferred by law on the IBP and see whether there have been abuses and transgressions thereof. The involuntary nature of membership in the association must also be revisited by the legislature if only to see to it that the constitutional freedom of association is not violated and that lawyers who think that the organization has outlived its raison detre or that it is no

longer serving the general interests of the bar can opt to go out of the IBP voluntarily.