Two bits of good news lighten up the start of 2025

In the fourth quarter of 2024, about 63 percent of Filipino families (17.4 million families) considered themselves poor.

- Satur C. Ocampo

This was the highest percentage since November 2003—or more than 20 years ago—when 59 percent or 16.3 million families said the same.

The data comes from the latest Social Weather Stations survey conducted nationwide, from Dec. 12 to 18. For the residents in Mindanao, a much higher 76 percent deemed themselves poor.

Surely, the increasing number of self-declared poor among our people is a cause for national concern. The government's poverty-reduction program definitely needs serious evaluation, what with the contributory negative causes such as calamities, both natural and man-made, that come aplenty every year.

This negative trend notwithstanding, two positive developments at the beginning of the new year provide us reasons to cheer up.

First is a recent Supreme Court ruling, penned by the prolific writer of lengthy, pithy decisions, Senior Associate Justice Marvic Leonen, which set the bar for the issuance of search warrants by the country's courts at all levels.

The ruling stresses that search warrants must particularly describe the place to be searched. Otherwise, it warns, the search warrant is deemed as a general warrant, which the Constitution prohibits.

General warrants provide the raiding police teams unlimited power to decide where to search and who or what to seize, which violates the guaranteed right to be secure in one's person, home and belongings.

The human rights alliance Karapatan welcomed the ruling. Its secretary general, Cristina Palabay, deems the ruling "especially significant" since State forces, including "unscrupulous judges, have been known to routinely violate this right by issuing and serving search warrants against activists targeted for persecution."

Palabay cited two cases of such defective search warrants.