MANILA, Philippines — Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio has declined an invitation by the House committee on justice to testify at the impeachment of Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno saying he knew nothing of the issues the panel wants to ask him about.
“I have written the committee declining to testify because I have no personal knowledge of the matters the committee mentioned in its reply to me. These are the matters the committee wants to question me,” Carpio said in a brief statement to media on Thursday, January 11.
In December, Carpio, without confirming if he would attend the first impeachment of the year in mid-January, wrote Oriental Mindoro Representative Reynaldo Umali, the justice committee chairman asking what the panel intended to question about.
SC Justice Carpio writes House panel, but won’t confirm attendance yet at Sereno case hearing
Lawyer Lorenzo Gadon, who filed the impeachment complaint against Sereno, accused her of, among others, culpable violation of the Constitution, partly because she supposedly assigned to herself the matter of whether to transfer outside of Mindanao terror cases filed over the Marawi crisis.
Three high court justices — Noel Tijam, Teresita de Castro, and Francis Jardeleza — earlier testified against Sereno.
