Two Cebu-based lawyers filed a petition at the Cebu City Regional Trial Court on Monday morning, June 21, seeking to stop the enforcement of a 10-day hotel quarantine for overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) and returning overseas Filipinos (ROFs) to Cebu.

The quarantine is being enforced by the Inter-Agency Task Force for Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF).

The request for a temporary restraining order and injunction of IATF’s quarantine protocols were filed by lawyers Clarence Paul Oaminal and Valentino Bacalso. They are represented by Benjamin Cabrido. 

Cabrido told Rappler in a statement that the basis of the petition was to “insist on the primacy of Cebu’s ordinance.”

“We filed this case to insist on the primacy of the Cebu Ordinance 2021-04 and Executive Order 17 relating to arriving OFWs and returning overseas Cebuanos over the IATF’s nonsensical protocol of hotel detention for a period of 10 days from arrival while waiting for the 7th day of swabbing,” Cabrido said.

He said of IATF’s protocols: its “ulterior purpose is nothing but to unduly burden them financially and psychologically.”

The petition was raffled to Cebu City Regional Trial Court Branch 10.

The lawyers are asking the court to suspend the enforcement of IATF Resolution 114 on quarantine and COVID-19 via an ex-parte restraining order for a period of 72 hours first while it conducts a summary hearing.

After the summary hearing, they are asking for another 20-day restraining order while it seeks to prove to the court that the IATF resolution is inapplicable within Cebu.

The petition follows a clash at a Senate hearing on June 15, between Cebu Governor Gwen Garcia and the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG).

The governor insisted on a provincial ordinance ordering a two-day quarantine with swab on arrival instead of the nationally-mandated 10-day facility-based quarantine. She asserted that the ordinance is supreme over IATF policy, citing the Local Government Code as her basis.

However, DILG Secretary Eduardo Año disagreed and stood by his position that it is the local government that must conform to national policy and not the other way around.

IATF protocols require the longer hotel quarantine with swabbing on the seventh day, to account for the five- to 14-day incubation period of the virus.

Secretary of Justice Menardo Guevarra spoke on the issue on Tuesday, May 22, and said that the filing of the case is “most welcome.”

“It provides a judicial forum for the settlement of an important legal issue that may crop up again in the future. The OSG will handle the case for the government,” Guevarra added.

The justice secretary said that the IATF resolutions acquire “legally binding force” because they are adopted by the President via an executive order.

IATF chair and Health Secretary Francisco Duque III said the protocols were in place to control the spread of the more transmissible Delta variant, which originated in India. 

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The petitioners pointed out they believe that by not swabbing OFWs and ROFs upon arrival, the IATF is automatically assuming that arrival date is “day one” of the incubation period.

“What is highly questionable is the assumption set forth by respondent as to when to reckon the first day for purposes of determining the seventh day viral load which is the date of arrival of returning OFWs and ROFs, which is clearly not an empirical evidence,” the petition read.

“For how can one believe it as close to being believable where respondent IATF impliedly assumes all passengers in one inbound flight to have originated from the same place with exactly similar climate and conditions and all of them behaving in wondrous synchrony prior to their travel to the Philippines?” they added.

They also argued that Section 105 of the local government code requires concurrence by the local government on health policies. So the provincial government’s ordinance on its own quarantine protocols, the petition said, is a sign of non-concurrence.

“The Honorable Court should declare IATF Resolution No. 114 unenforceable and inapplicable in Cebu Province because the Governor and the Sangguniang Panlalawigan have the inherent authority to respond to and protect the people of Cebu from a public health emergency,” the petition read. 

Cebu’s refusal to heed national quarantine protocols prompted President Rodrigo Duterte to order international flights bound for Cebu rerouted to Manila from May 29 to June 12.

Despite Garcia’s meeting with the President on May 31 to justify the province’s own quarantine policies, the national government did not budge and ordered IATF protocols enforced at the Mactan Cebu International Airport, the country’s second busiest airport.

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Meanwhile, during a DOH briefing on Monday, June 21, Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire underscored the need to follow IATF protocols in Cebu to ward off the entry of the COVID-19 Delta variant.

“Lahat po tayo ngayon ay nasa heightened alert po lahat. Lahat ng local government units were informed. Lahat po ng mga regional offices were informed na kailangan bantayan maigi ang Delta variant across our border,” she said.

(We are all on heightened alert. Every local government unit was informed. All regional offices were informed that we need to keep a close eye out for the Delta variant across our border.)

“So, we cannot have non-uniformity in the implementation of our border control,” added Vergeire. – with a report from Lorraine Ecarma/Rappler.com