House-approved divorce bill suffers snag in transmittal to Senate
Albay 1st District Rep. Edcel lagman | PHOTO: Official Facebook page of Edcel Lagman
MANILA, Philippines — The House of Representatives has yet to submit the bill it passed on absolute divorce to the Senate after the Office of the Secretary General deferred the measure’s transmittal to the upper chamber.
In a letter written by Albay First District Rep. Edcel Lagman, the lawmaker said that the office of House Secretary General Reginald Velasco “deferred the transmittal to the Senate of House Bill No. 9349 or “An Act Reinstituting Absolute Divorce as an Alternative Mode for the Dissolution of Marriage.” The lower chamber approved the measure on the third and final reading last May 22.
READ: House OKs divorce bill: ‘No monster’
“The purported reason for the delay is that there is a need to report for the Plenary’s action the corrected affirmative votes from 126 to 131,” Lagman said in a letter released to the media on Wednesday.
“I beg to disagree. There is no need to wait. Whether the affirmative margin was 126 against 109, as initially reported by the staff of the Office of the Secretary General, or 131 to 109, as subsequently corrected on the same day, the irreversible fact is that the affirmative votes got the majority of those who voted with the presence of a quorum and without the abstentions being counted,” he asserted.
According to Lagman, even though there are adjustments in the affirmative votes but none in the negative, then the ultimate result of voting will not be altered. He likewise pointed out that a “nonmember of the House has officially protested challenging the result.”
“The correction can be made when the House opens its Third Regular Session on 22 July 2024, without prejudice to the mandate of the House for the Secretary General to transmit immediately to the Senate the engrossed copy of the approved absolute divorce bill,” Lagman said.
Among the grounds for absolute divorce include: physical violence or grossly abusive conduct directed against the petitioner, a common child, or a child of the petitioner; physical violence or moral pressure to compel the petitioner to change religious or political affiliation; and attempt of respondent to corrupt or induce the petitioner, a common child, or a child of the petitioner, to engage in prostitution, or connivance in such corruption or inducement.
Below are the other grounds mentioned in the measure:
- Final judgment sentencing the respondent to imprisonment of more than six (6) years, even if pardoned
- Drug addiction or habitual alcoholism or chronic gambling of the respondent
- Homosexuality of the respondent
- Contracting by the respondent of a subsequent bigamous marriage, whether in the Philippines or abroad
- Marital infidelity or perversion or having a child with another person other than one’s spouse during the marriage, except when upon the mutual agreement of the spouses, a child is born to them through in vitro fertilization or a similar procedure or when the wife bears a child after being a victim of rape
- Attempt by the respondent against the life of the petitioner, a common child or a child of the petitioner
- Abandonment of petitioner by respondent without justifiable cause for more than one (1) year
- When the spouses are legally separated by judicial decree for more than two (2) years, either spouse can petition the proper Family Court for an absolute divorce based on said judicial decree of legal separation