One of
the cherished liberties guaranteed us in the Bill of Rights is the
liberty of abode, or the right to stay in the place of our choice. So,
the government cannot dictate upon us where our residence or domicile
should be, and our right to change the same within the limits prescribed
by law cannot be curtailed. Neither shall the right to travel be
impaired except in the interest of national security, public safety, or
public health, as may be provided by law.
Before we proceed, a word of caution. As one of my professors emphasized during my student days: "You can stretch your arms as far out as you want, as long as it does not touch your neighbor’s nose". This means that there is always a balancing of rights. There is no such thing as an absolute or unbridled right. The exercise of any right is always subject to limitations, because we live in a society where other people also have rights. The government, too, has rights.
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Back to our discussions on the liberty of abode. There is no law student who will ever forget the case of Zacarias Villavicencio, et al. vs. Justo Lukban, G.R. No. 14639, March 25, 1919, which illustrated this constitutional right. This was decided by our Supreme Court almost one hundred years ago.
*****
Prostitutes in Manila proliferated in Gardenia Street, in the
District of Sampaloc, before and around the year 1918 where they had
been permitted to ply their trades for a number of years. Eventually,
the Mayor of the City of Manila at that time, Justo Lukban, for the best
of all reasons, to exterminate vice, ordered the segregated Gardenia
Street closed.
*****
Between October 16 and October 25, 1918, the women were kept confined
to their houses in the district by the police. During this period, the
city authorities quietly perfected arrangements with the Bureau of Labor
for sending the women to Davao, as laborers.
*****
About midnight of October 25, the police, acting pursuant to orders
from the chief of police, Anton Hohmann and the Mayor of the city of
Manila, Justo Lukban, descended upon the houses, hustled some 170
inmates into patrol wagons, and placed them aboard the coastguard
cutters Corregidor and Negros that awaited their arrival.
The women were given no opportunity to collect their belongings, and
apparently were under the impression that they were being taken to a
police station for an investigation. They had no knowledge that they
were destined for a life in Mindanao. They had not been asked if they
wished to depart for that region and had neither given their consent to
the deportation. The involuntary guests were received on board the ships
by a representative of the Bureau of Labor and a detachment of
Constabulary soldiers.
*****
The vessels reached their destination at Davao on October 29. The
women were landed and receipted for as laborers by Francisco Sales,
provincial governor of Davao, and by Feliciano Yñigo and Rafael
Castillo. The governor and the haciendero Yñigo had no previous notification that the women were prostitutes who had been expelled from the city of Manila.
*****
The attorney for the relatives and friends of a considerable number
of the deportees filed a case with the Supreme Court for the production
in court of the women who have been forcibly deported, and asked the
court to inquire into the validity of their deportation.
*****
In declaring illegal the aforementioned acts of Mayor Lukban and the
Chief of Police, the Supreme Court said that the liberty of abode is a
principle so deeply imbedded in jurisprudence and considered so
elementary in nature as not even to require a constitutional sanction.
Even the Governor-General of the Philippine Islands, even the President
of the United States, who has often been said to exercise more power
than any king or potentate, has no such arbitrary prerogative, either
inherent or express. Much less, therefore, has the executive of a
municipality, who acts within a sphere of delegated powers. If the mayor
and the chief of police could, at their mere behest or even for the
most praiseworthy of motives, render the liberty of the citizen so
insecure, then the mayors and chiefs of police of one thousand other
municipalities of the Philippines have the same privilege. If these
officials can take to themselves such power, then any other official can
do the same. And if any official can exercise the power, then all
persons would have just as much right to do so. And if a prostitute
could be sent against her wishes and under no law from one locality to
another within the country, then officialdom can hold the same club over
the head of any citizen.
*****
The Court emphasized that no official, no matter how high, is above
the law. "The law is the only supreme power in our system of government,
and every man who by accepting office participates in its functions is
only the more strongly bound to submit to that supremacy, and to observe
the limitations which it imposes upon the exercise of the authority
which it gives." (U.S. vs. Lee [1882], 106 U.S., 196, 220.) "The very
idea that one man may be compelled to hold his life, or the means of
living, or any material right essential to the enjoyment of life, at the
mere will of another, seems to be intolerable in any country where
freedom prevails, as being the essence of slavery itself." 
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