Soft law does not fall into any of the categories of international law set forth in Article 38,

Chapter III of the 1946 Statute of the International Court of Justice. [32] It is, however, an
expression of non-binding norms, principles, and practices that influence state behavior.
[33]
Certain declarations and resolutions of the UN General Assembly fall under this category.
[34]
The most notable is the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which this Court has enforced in
various cases, specifically.
The constitutional provision directing the CHR to "provide for preventive measures and legal aid
services to the underprivileged whose human rights have been violated or need protection" may
not be construed to confer jurisdiction on the Commission to issue a restraining order or writ of
injunction for, if that were the intention, the Constitution would have expressly said so.
The fair and proper rule, to our mind, is to consider all the pieces of evidence adduced in their
totality, and to consider any evidence otherwise inadmissible under our usual rules to be
admissible if it is consistent with the admissible evidence adduced. In other words, we reduce
our rules to the most basic test of reason i.e., to the relevance of the evidence to
the issue at hand and its consistency with all other pieces of adduced evidence. Thus,
even hearsay evidence can be admitted if it satisfies this basic minimum test. We note
in this regard that the use of flexibility in the consideration of evidence is not at all novel in the
Philippine legal system. In child abuse cases, Section 28 of the Rule on Examination of a Child
Witness[157] is expressly recognized as an exception to the hearsay rule. This Rule allows the
admission of the hearsay testimony of a child describing any act or attempted act of sexual
abuse in any criminal or non-criminal proceeding, subject to certain prerequisites and the right of
cross-examination by the adverse party. The admission of the statement is determined by the
court in light of specified subjective and objective considerations that provide sufficient indicia of
reliability of the child witness. [158] These requisites for admission find their counterpart in the
present case under the above-described conditions for the exercise of flexibility in the
consideration of evidence, including hearsay evidence, in extrajudicial killings and enforced
disappearance cases. To say that this piece of evidence is incompetent and inadmissible
evidence of what it substantively states is to acknowledge as the petitioners effectively suggest
that in the absence of any direct evidence, we should simply dismiss the petition. To our mind,
an immediate dismissal for this reason is no different from a statement that theAmparo Rule
despite its terms is ineffective, as it cannot allow for the special evidentiary difficulties that are
unavoidably present in Amparo situations, particularly in extrajudicial killings and enforced
disappearances. The Amparo Rule was not promulgated with this intent or with the intent to
make it a token gesture of concern for constitutional rights. It was promulgated to provide
effective and timely remedies, using and profiting from local and international experiences in
extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances, as the situation may require. Consequently,
we have no choice but to meet the evidentiary difficulties inherent in enforced disappearances
with the flexibility that these difficulties demand.
The writ of amparo serves both preventive and curative roles in addressing the problem of
extralegal killings and enforced disappearances. It is preventive in that it breaks the expectation
of impunity in the commission of these offenses; it is curative in that it facilitates the subsequent
punishment of perpetrators as it will inevitably yield leads to subsequent investigation and
action. In the long run, the goal of both the preventive and curative roles is to deter the further
commission of extralegal killings and enforced disappearances.
Rubrico, however, recognizes a preliminary yet limited application of command
responsibility
in amparo cases
to
instances
of
determining
the responsible or accountableindividuals or entities that are duty-bound to abate any
transgression on the life, liberty or security of the aggrieved party.
If command responsibility were to be invoked and applied to these
proceedings, it should, at most, be only to determine the author who, at the
first instance, is accountable for, and has the duty to address, the

disappearance and harassments complained of, so as to enable the Court

to devise remedial measures that may be appropriate under
the premises to protect rights covered by the writ of amparo. As intimated
earlier, however, the determination should not be pursued to fix criminal liability on
respondents preparatory to criminal prosecution, or as a prelude to administrative
disciplinary proceedings under existing administrative issuances, if there be any.
[52]
(emphasis and underscoring supplied)
In other words, command responsibility may be loosely applied in amparo cases in
order to identify those accountable individuals that have the power to effectively implement
whatever processes an amparo court would issue.[53] In such application, the amparo court does
not impute criminal responsibility but merely pinpoint the superiors it considers to be in the best
position to protect the rights of the aggrieved party.
Such identification of the responsible and accountable superiors may well be a preliminary
determination of criminal liability which, of course, is still subject to further investigation by the
appropriate government agency.
Relatedly, the legislature came up with Republic Act No. 9851 [54] (RA 9851) to include
command responsibility as a form of criminal complicity in crimes against international
humanitarian law, genocide and other crimes. [55] RA 9851 is thus the substantive law that
definitively imputes criminal liability to those superiors who, despite their position, still fail to
take all necessary and reasonable measures within their power to prevent or repress the
commission of illegal acts or to submit these matters to the competent authorities for
investigation and prosecution.