The United States government has asked the U. S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C. to dismiss the class action suit seeking benefits filed by six Filipino World War II veterans and their next of kin, “for lack of jurisdiction and failure to stake a claim.”
The veterans, filing pro se (without a lawyer), have asked Judge Thomas C. Wheeler to grant them benefits equal to those of American veterans, who fought side by side with them against the Japanese during World War II.
U.S. Department of Justice Civil Direction Jeanne E. Davidson, Assistant Director Donald E. Kinner, assistant director, and Kenneth S. Kessler of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Commercial Litigation Branch told Judge Wheeler that the plaintiffs “cannot establish jurisdiction as there is no money-mandating statute to support their prayers for back pay and related benefits.”
The battery of lawyers for the U.S. government told the plaintiffs – Rev. Fr. Prisco E. Entines, Justina Corcelles Hernandez, Francisco Gutierrez Ferrer, Julieta Taboada Abella, Maria Lapay Laurenciano and Wenceslao N. Rodriguez – that because their claims accrued more than six years before these complaints were filed, they are barred by the statute of limitations.”
The U.S. government lawyers added, “The demand for benefits like those claimed by plaintiffs has been extensively litigated in this circuit and others and were found to be without merit, leaving no doubt that plaintiffs have failed to state claims for which relief can be granted.”
The government lawyers told the court that although the Philippines was ceded by Spain and became a U.S. territory under the Treaty of Paris and the Philippine Independence Act of 1934 provided for the eventual Philippine independence by creating the interim Commonwealth of the Philippines until it became independent on July 4, 1946, the Philippines has been described as “unique.” “Although not in all aspects a foreign territory, the Philippines is a foreign country for many purposes.”
Among other things, the Act of 1934 reserved to the United States the power to maintain military bases and armed forces in the Philippines and, upon orders of the U.S. president, the right to “call into service of such armed forces all military organized by the Philippine government.”
It was under this authority that President Roosevelt, by an Executive Order on April 26, 1941, did call “into service of the armed forces of the United States all military organized by the Philippine government for the period of the imminent WWII emergency and placed that military under the command of general officers and commandant of the U.S. Army and Navy.”
In October 1945, at the end of WWII, while the U.S. Congress was considering a $200 million appropriation for the support of the Philippine Army during the War, the chairman of the Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Appropriation sent a letter to the director of the Veterans Administration inquiring about the potential cost of veteran services for Filipinos. He was told that it “would amount in the long run to approximately $3 billion.”
Three senators of the subcommittee – Kenneth McKellar (D-TN), acting chairman; Richard B. Russell (D-GA), and C. Wayland Brooks (R-IL) – introduced an amendment, reducing the “liability for veterans from $3 billion to $500 million, limiting benefits to pensions on account of service-connected disability or death at the rate of ‘one Philippine peso for each dollar otherwise authorized.’”
