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The Supreme Court will not hold the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) in contempt for installing an artificial white beach along Manila Bay, and ruled that it has yet to find any violation of its order to rehabilitate and preserve the port.
The court denied the motion to intervene filed by the progressive group Akbayan, which alleged that DENR violated the SC’s ongoing mandamus or the Manila Bay Cleanup and Maintenance Order by dumping crushed dolomite into a portion of the bay.
DENR has come under fire for its $ 28 million dolomite beach project, a part of a larger beach nutrition program, and the dangers the material is said to pose to humans and the ecosystem.
The Health Department initially said that inhaling crushed dolomite can cause respiratory problems, but later clarified that the material in its massive state “is not a known health hazard.”
In its en banc session on Tuesday, the court said the intervention no longer applies because the case had been firmly decided as early as 2008 and is now being executed, albeit still under its supervision due to the nature of the order.
“The Court held that it has not yet found any violation of the continuing injunction amid the quarterly reports submitted by the concerned agencies and the on-site visual inspection conducted by the Manila Bay Advisory Committee (MBAC),” the Information Office SC Public (PIO) said Thursday.
“The Court, at least for the moment, must maintain its disciplinary hand,” said the SC PIO.
The MBAC is chaired by Chief Justice Diosdado Peralta, the only titular judge already on the court when he issued a landmark decision ordering the government to clean, rehabilitate and preserve Manila Bay 12 years ago.
The court also said that DENR “has not been negligent” in its duty to report on the work of the government agencies involved in compliance with the continuing injunction.
He said the dolomites beach project came from DENR’s own beach nutrition program and not from the court order, meaning it was not an activity that could be “objectively measured as a deviation” from what the order directed the government do.
“The dispute is generated only when the supposed dangerous potential of the dolomite component enters the scene, so it is clear that the bone of contention at all times is not the project itself, but the material used to carry it out,” he said the SC PIO. .
What Akbayan did, he said, was challenge “the wisdom behind the use of the dolomite component,” a “matter of fact” that the highest Philippine court does not normally resolve.
“It is a challenge that is properly in the realm of political issues in which the Court cannot venture even incidentally into contempt proceedings in the given circumstances,” said SC PIO.
He did not mention how the court voted, only that Judge Marvic Leonen wrote a separate opinion.
A copy of the resolution was not immediately available. – RSJ, GMA News
