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Lagman: Imelda's prison is her conscience


Ilocos Norte Representative Imelda Marcos will be "a prisoner of her own conscience" and will not be liberated despite the grant of bail by the Sandiganbayan,  Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman said Friday.

"No conscience is so callous as not to be afflicted by guilt and remorse," Lagman, an opposition leader at the House of Representatives, said.

"The massive human rights atrocities and pillage during Marcos’ martial law will perpetually haunt the Marcoses and condemn them to the prison of history," he added in a statement.

Lagman's borther, Hermon, was among the desaparecidos during the martial law years, which was ruled by the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

Mrs. Marcos, 89, was ordered last week to serve six to 11 years in prison for each of the seven counts of graft for using her position as government official to unlawfully participate and benefit from managing non-government organizations in Switzerland from 1978 to 1984.

On Friday, she was allowed to post a P150,000 bail pending the resolution of her motion seeking post-conviction remedies.

Former Senator Rene Saguisag said Marcos' conviction was accordance with a July 15, 2003 Supreme Court decision mandating the Marcoses to return at least $10 billion of their ill-gotten wealth to the government.

“Conviction, to me, is humiliating enough,” Saguisag said in a separate email to GMA News Online.

Lawyer Edre Olalia of the National Union of People's Lawyers (NUPL) said the bail grant to Marcos showed that "some are more powerful than others."

"And so it came to pass that by a mere motion of a convicted plunderer, the Philippine court deferred and bid its time in the actual issuance of the arrest warrant against an accused who has lost all legal remedies by reason of her failure to attend the said promulgation," he said in a statement.

"So after 27 long agonizing years,  the Filipino people are again made to wait for the reckoning. Meantime, Imelda can go on partying the nights away, run for elections together with her forgetful eldest daughter, and wait for his son, the dictator’s namesake, to become president. Because some are more powerful than others," Olalia added. — LDF, GMA News

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