THE House committee on population and family relations yesterday approved in principle various bills seeking to legalize absolute divorce and allowing the dissolution of marriages to free couples in problematic marriages, a measure which was never acted upon by the Senate in previous Congresses.
“The Philippines will soon join the rest of the world in the legalization of absolute divorce,” said Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman, the principal author of House Bill No. 78 on absolute divorce.
In the previous 17th Congress, the divorce bill reached as far as approval on third and final reading but gathered dust in the Senate which sat on the measure.
Pending the formulation of a substitute bill, the House committee “approved in principle” the eight bills seeking to allow divorce and the dissolution of marriages.
Lagman was appointed to head the technical working group tasked to consolidate the measures “with special concern on the civil recognition of marriages dissolved by the Catholic Church and other recognized religious denomination as a possible separate measure but a companion bill to the absolute divorce bill.”
“It is comprehensive enough to include the grant of civil recognition to the dissolution of marriages by the matrimonial tribunals of the Catholic Church and other recognized religious denominations, which is the subject of House Bill No. 1021 and No. 1593,” Lagman said of his divorce bill.
The proposals were approved after the panel heard the positions of stakeholders, including the Philippine Commission on Women (PCW) which threw its full support behind the proposed legislation.
“As to divorce and dissolution of marriage, we fully support these bills filed to free married couples from the tedious process of annulment, be it in a form of divorce or dissolution of marriage,” Armando Orcilla Jr., senior gender and development specialist of the PCW’s policy development, planning, monitoring and evaluation division told the panel.
Orcilla lamented that because of failed marriages, “women are sometimes solely burdened to financially provide for the children and balance this with their personal struggles of loneliness and social stigma due to cultural stereotypes under the current legal system.”
Since absolute divorce is not a new or foreign concept to Filipinos, Lagman said the title of the measure would be a bill “reinstituting” absolute divorce, adding that pre-Spanish Filipinos practiced divorce which was available to both spouses.
There was also limited absolute divorce during the American era and the grounds for divorce were expanded during the Japanese occupation, said the opposition lawmaker.
Lagman said all countries worldwide have statutes on absolute divorce “in varying degrees of liberality, including all of the Catholic countries except the Vatican City State which has a population of only about 800 residents, mostly priests and nuns.”
“The Philippines is now the only country which has not legalized absolute divorce.
Considering that divorce is worldwide, there can be no blunder in unanimity for its global legalization,” he said. “Divorce is urgently necessary in exceptional cases for couples in inordinately toxic and irreparably dysfunctional marriages, particularly the wives who are abused or abandoned.”
The veteran lawyer-lawmaker said the State “has the responsibility of rescuing couples and their children from a house on fire.”
Rep. Pantaleon Alvarez, in his sponsorship speech for House Bill no. 4998, said the people “should be given a chance to correct wrong choices and, upon closing that chapter and learning its lessons, they should be allowed to once again journey off and find a partner with whom they are truly compatible with; the kind who will really be a witness and companion to their life, in sickness and in health, till death do them part.”
Tingog party-list Rep. Yedda Marie Romualdez, wife of Speaker Martin Romualdez, welcomed the approval at the committee level of her House Bill No. 1953, a measure seeking civil recognition of church annulment to make it accessible and not expensive for many Filipinos.
Rep. Jude Acidre, also of Tingog, said that under their bill, a declaration of nullity decreed by the Church will hold as much weight and have the same effect as a civil annulment.
“This removes the burden of undergoing the civil annulment process. As a result, Catholics who have sought annulment in the Church should not anymore be ‘long oppressed by the darkness of doubt’ over whether their marriages already declared null and void should also be recognized as such by the State,” Acidre said.
HB 1953 proposes that a marriage duly and legally solemnized by a priest, imam, rabbi, or presiding elder of an established church or religion in the Philippines which is subsequently annulled, dissolved or declared null in a final judgment or decree in accordance with the canons and precepts of the church or religious sect, shall have the same effect as a decree of annulment, dissolution or declaration of nullity issued by a competent court.
“A marriage solemnized by the Church therefore should have not only canonical but civil effects as well. Priests, pastors, imams and rabbis who solemnize marriage must have the authority to solemnize granted by the State,” Romualdez and Acidre said in the explanatory note of the bill.
