There's a joke here in the Philippines: if you ever want to learn about your family history, just run for office. Your opponents will dig all that up for you free of charge!
Philippine elections are about name recall. Binay, Binay, Binay, Binay... Grace? Grace Poe is the Filipina politician second to Binay in the polls so you know what that means. She must be destroyed and step one of that process is to examine her qualifications for a potential presidential run.
The issue is citizenship. However, I'm not interested about her citizenship in the later years of her life and today. I'm more interested in the theories swirling about, on whether or not she can be considered a natural-born Filipino citizen.
Grace Poe was a foundling left inside a church as a baby. As far as origin stories go, her life seems tailor-made for the Philippine audience but I digress. Her biological parents are unknown so there's this argument that we cannot consider her as a natural-born Filipino. The Philippines follows the principle of jus sanguinis, that is, that nationality is determined by blood. Since we have no idea who her parents are, we can't say with absolute confidence that they were Filipinos. There is a possibility, no matter how ridiculously improbable and outlandish, that both her biological parents were foreigners who just happened to be in the Philippines and were too poor to raise a child and so left the very Filipino-looking Grace Poe in a church. Accepting this possibility, Grace Poe could have no Filipino blood in her, couldn't be a Filipino by birth and is thus unqualified to run for President.
The question I find interesting is: What is the nationality of a foundling when the parents are unknown? The law seems to have a blind spot in that in all the ways to acquire Philippine citizenship, it's mum on foundlings; babies appearing out of nowhere. It would be nice to say that we should just presume the foundling is Filipino but from where will we base this presumption?
I'm sure some foreign jurisprudence has already answered this somewhere. For me, the foundling's nationality should be the place where he/she was found. It makes sense although its jus soli. I'm sure Philippine Law can be stretched to make an exception. Our laws have this obsession with children after all, always looking out for their best interests and what not. Parens patriae? The government should just grant foundlings citizenship then. It is rather cruel not to allow abandoned children in this circumstance to have a country to call home.
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