Jovito Reyes Salonga, KGCR (Tagalog pronunciation: [hoˈvito sɐˈlɔŋga]; June 22, 1920 – March 10, 2016) also called "Ka Jovy," was a Filipino lawyer and politician, as well as a leading opposition leader during the regime of Ferdinand Marcos from the declaration of martial law in 1972 until the People Power Revolution in 1986, which removed Marcos from power. Salonga was then elected as the 14th president of the Senate of the Philippines and the first one after the new Constitution was just ratified, serving from 1987 up to his retirement from politics in 1992.
Salonga was known as the "Nation's Premier Fiscalizer." He is the only person to top the bar exam and the senatorial race multiple times (with the sole record of three elections garnering the highest number of popular votes in 1965, 1971, and 1987 immediately after People Power).
Jovito Salonga was born in poverty in 175 Dr. Pilapil St., Brgy. San Miguel, Pasig on June 22, 1920. His father was a Presbyterian pastor, Esteban Salonga and his mother, Bernardita Dinang Reyes, was a market vendor. His parents married in 1904. Jovito Salonga, the youngest of five brothers, worked his way through college and law school as a proofreader in the publishing firm of his eldest brother, Isayas. He spent time shoe-shining and selling newspapers in the streets of Pasig. Salonga graduated at Pasig Elementary School and Rizal High School, where his bust now resides. During his senior year at the College of Law at the University of the Philippines (U.P.) in Manila, he quit his job to prepare for the bar exam. Due to the beginning of World War II, he postponed taking the Philippine Bar Examination until 1944, when he topped the bar with a then-record grade point average of 95.3%.
A few months after the Japanese invasion in December 1941, Salonga went underground and engaged in anti-Japanese activities. In April 1942, he was captured and tortured by the Japanese Military Police in Pasig in the presence of his aging father. He was transferred to Fort Santiago and several other prisons where he was subjected to further persecution. On June 11, 1942, he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor by the Japanese and incarcerated at the New Bilibid Prison in Muntinlupa, but was pardoned on the Foundation Day of Japan (Kigen Setsu) in 1943.
After passing the bar, he went back to the U.P. College of Law where he earned an LL.B in 1946. He traveled to the U.S. when he won a scholarship to attend Harvard for his master's degree. Recommended by Harvard professor Manley Hudson to Yale Law School, he was awarded a fellowship at Yale University where he earned a Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD) in 1949. He however turned down their offer of a faculty position because he felt he should participate in his country's post-war reconstruction. He was honored with the Ambrose Gherini Prize for writing the best paper in international law. At Yale, he met Jose B. Laurel, son of wartime President Jose P. Laurel, who later became his law partner in the Philippines. In February 1948, he married Lydia Busuego in Cambridge, Massachusetts who gave birth to their first son, Esteban Fernando "Steve" Salonga, among other children. They lived in Valle Verde III Subdivision in Pasig.
Salonga returned to the Philippines to pursue teaching and the practice of law. He authored several books on corporate law and international law, and was appointed Dean of the Far Eastern University Institute of Law in 1956. His student and later associate was future Chief Justice Artemio Panganiban, who said the three finest lawyers in history were Salonga, fellow ally Sen. Diokno, and future Chief Justice Claudio Ong Teehankee. On December 16, 1988, Arizona State University selected him to receive an honorary degree.
Central Philippine University and Silliman University, which were founded by Protestant Americans, conferred him with honorary degrees.
In 1960, he was persuaded by Vice President Diosdado Macapagal, then president of the Liberal Party (LP), one of the two dominant political parties in the Philippines at the time and party of one of his early heroes founder Manuel Roxas, to run for Congress in the second district of Rizal, where two political dynasties dominated the bureaucracy. Salonga helped build the party from the grassroots, largely with the support of disgruntled young people who responded to the issues he raised, particularly the entrenchment of the political ruling class and their families in seats of governments, a major cause of disenchantment among the masses. In the November 1961 elections, he bested his two opponents by an overwhelming margin.
Shortly after his election, he tangled with one of the best debaters of the opposing party, the Nacionalista Party (NP), on the issue of proportional representation in various committees. He also composed a seminal article, published and editorialized in various papers, on the Philippines' territorial claim to North Borneo (Sabah). With the election of Cornelio Villareal (LP, Capiz) as Speaker of the House, Salonga was appointed to the chairmanship of the prestigious Committee on Good Government and led the committee in conducting inquires in aid of legislation relentlessly about the prevailing graft and corruption in the government and recommended filing of charges against some government officials and employees. In June 1962, President Macapagal filed the Philippine petition against Malaysia's alleged illegal expropriation of North Borneo. Salonga was appointed to head the delegation in the January 1963 London negotiations.
After one term, Salonga was chosen to run for Senate under the LP banner in the 1965 elections. Despite limited financial resources and the victory of NP candidate Marcos as president, Salonga was elected senator, garnering the most votes. In 1967, he was Benigno Aquino Jr.'s chief lawyer in the underage lawsuit filed against the latter by President Marcos. Largely through Salonga's skills in jurisprudence, Aquino won his case before the Commission on Elections. Subsequently, Marcos' appeals to the Supreme Court and Senate Electoral Tribunal were overturned, granting a final victory to Salonga and Aquino. For his well-documented exposés against the Marcos administration, Salonga was hailed as the "Nation's Fiscalizer" by the Philippines Free Press in 1968.
He ran for re-election in 1971. Along with some members of the Liberal Party, he was critically injured on the August 21 bombing of his party's proclamation rally at Plaza Miranda. His doctors' prognoses were grim—he was not expected to live. He survived, however, with impaired eyesight and hearing, and more than a hundred tiny pieces of shrapnel in his body. He topped the senatorial race for the second time.
He returned to the political arena and embarked on a successful law career. He protested martial law and was unjustly arrested. After his release from military custody, he was offered a visiting scholarship at Yale, where he engaged in the revision of his book on international law. He completed his book on the Marcos years, which included a program for a new democratic Philippines.
The imposition of martial law in September 1972 was the catalyst that radicalized hundreds of oppositionists and the pretext to arrest and imprison many of them, including moderate ones. Salonga openly and vigorously opposed it, and he and his law partners, future Justice Secretary Sedfrey Ordoñez and future Chief Justice Pedro L. Yap, defended many cases of well-known political prisoners as well as obscure detainees, most of them on a pro bono basis.
In October 1980, after the bombing of the Philippine International Convention Center, Marcos again ordered Salonga's arrest; this time he was detained at Fort Bonifacio without any formal charges and investigation. He was allowed to leave with his wife for the U.S. in March 1981, to attend several international conferences and undergo medical procedures. Right after their departure, subversion charges—supposedly a well-known Marcos tactic to scare off his enemies from ever returning—were filed against him. Jovito and Lydia Salonga lived in self-exile in Hawaii, then moved to Encino, California, where he was visited by many opposition leaders, including Ninoy Aquino. It was here where, at the request of LP President Gerry Roxas, Salonga wrote the party's