At a glance:

• Claim: Former president Ferdinand Marcos wrote 90% of the 1987 Philippine Constitution from his sheer intelligence.
• Rating: FALSE
• The facts: A Constitutional Commission, composed of 48 individuals, drafted the 1987 Constitution. Marcos was not part of this.
• Why we fact checked this: Facebook’s monitoring tool flagged a video with this claim for containing potentially false information. The video had over 77,500 views and 3,200 shares.

Complete details:

Facebook page Bayan Kong Sinilangan uploaded a video on October 5 that claimed the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos wrote 90% of the 1987 Philippine Constitution on his own, from his sheer intelligence.

“Kung walang Marcos, hindi magkakaroon ng 6,000+ na batas ang ating Philippine Constitution na kung saan ay almost 90% ng 1987 Constitution ay isinulat ni Marcos mula ng kanyang katalinuhan,” the video said. (If there were no Marcos, our Philippine Constitution wouldn’t have over 6,000 laws – which Marcos wrote almost 90% from his sheer intelligence.)

This claim is false. The 1987 Constitution was drafted after Marcos was ousted in the 1986 People Power Revolution.

A 48-member Constitutional Commission (ConCom) finished drafting the 1987 Constitution on October 12, 1986. It was then ratified on February 11, 1987 after a national plebiscite was held on February 2 that year.

During this time, Marcos was already in exile in Hawaii, where he and his family stayed for years. Marcos eventually died there on September 28, 1989.

Then-President Corazon Aquino formed the ConCom in April 1986. She appointed members that would represent all sectors in the country, which included Bishop Teodoro Bacani, former Supreme Court (SC) chief justice Roberto Concepcion, former labor minister Blas Ople, and then-University of the Philippines student council chair (now Commission on Human Rights chair) Chito Gascon, among others. Cecilia Muñoz-Palma, the country’s first female SC justice, headed the ConCom.

Moreover, one of the reasons why Aquino formed a ConCom for the 1987 Constitution was because she wanted to replace the 1973 Constitution drafted during the Marcos years, as “she did not want to derive legitimacy and power from the very institutions that she fought.”

The 1987 Constitution is also only composed of the preamble and 18 articles that had self-contained sections, except for Article I. The total number of sections is only 305, not 6,000 as the video claimed.

The video ran for 8 minutes and 47 seconds. It contained other claims, such as the Marcoses’ supposed gold and how their own wealth helped the country prosper. This was previously debunked by Rappler.

As of writing, the video had over 77,500 views, 3,200 shares, 6,300 reactions, and 570 comments. Facebook’s monitoring tool called Claim Check flagged the video for fact checkers to verify. It was reported at least 11 times for containing potentially false information. – Pauline Macaraeg/Rappler.com

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