Alejo Mabanag

Alejo Razulo Mabanag (born July 4, 1886 in San Fernando , La Union province , † after 1961 ) was a Filipino lawyer and politician of the Nacionalista Party , who was several times a senator and between 1959 and 1961 Minister of Justice.

Life

Lawyer and local politician

After completing school, Mabanag worked in the executive office of the US Governor General of the Philippines between 1903 and 1912 and also completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Santo Tomas , which he completed in 1908 with a Bachelor of Arts (BA). A subsequent postgraduate study of law at the law faculty La Jurisprudencia , he graduated in 1912 with a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) and was at that time a senior executive in the executive office of the Governor General.

After he had received his legal license in 1912, he took up a practice as a lawyer and founded a law firm in Lingayen , the capital of the Pangasinan Province . Cipriano Primicias , who was also a senator between 1951 and 1963, was one of his later collaborators .

A few years later, Mabanag began his political career in local politics and served between 1916 and 1919 as a member of the Lingayen municipal council .

Senator, judge and prosecutor

In 1922, Mabanag was elected for the first time by an overwhelming majority in the second Senate electoral district of La Union and was a member of the Senate for six years until 1928, where he represented the electoral district first with Bernabe de Guzman and then between 1925 and 1928 together with Camilo Osias . He was re-elected Senator in the second Senate electoral district of La Union in 1931 and represented this district together with Teofilo Sison until 1935 .

After the founding of the Commonwealth of the Philippines on November 15, 1935, Mabanag was appointed Judge at the Court of First Instance of Iloilo by President Manuel Quezon and held this position until 1938. He then served as Manila Prosecutor between 1938 and 1945 .

Re-election as Senator and Minister of Justice

He then ran again for the Senate of the first Congress and was in the elections of April 23, 1946 for the Nacionalista Party and achieved tenth place among 67 candidates with 608,902 votes (23.7 percent). The first eight elected members acted as members of the Senate for a six-year, full legislative period, while those elected in places nine to 16 were members of the Senate for a three-year and thus half legislative period. Mabanag was a member of the Senate of the First Congress for a three-year period. In the elections of November 8, 1949, he ran for re-election, but this time with 1,150,818 votes (32.1 percent) of the eight seats to be awarded, he only achieved tenth place. He served at times as chairman of the influential committee on public accountability, the so-called Blue Ribbon Committee , which deals with the investigation of bribery and corruption in the government.

In the next elections on November 10, 1953, Mabanag ran on the list of the presidential candidate of the Nacionalista Party, Ramon Magsaysay , again for a Senate mandate and was now elected with 1,846,190 votes (42.7 percent) in the seventh of eight seats to be allocated and thus for a full six-year term. During his tenure in the Senate, he served on the committees on Corporations and Franchising, Law and Amendment, Government Reorganization, Investigations, Justice, Labor and Immigration, National Defense and Security, State Corporations, Provincial, Urban and local governments as well as for transport and public services.

On July 14, 1959, Mabanag was appointed by President Carlos P. Garcia to succeed Enrique Fernández as Secretary of Justice in his cabinet, to which he was a member until the end of Garcia's term on December 31, 1961. His successor as Minister of Justice in the cabinet of the new President Diosdado Macapagal was Jose Diokno .

Publications

• Speech of Senator Alejo Mabanag Against the Bell Act and Agreement: Delivered on the Floor of the Senate on July 1, 1946 , 1946

Web links

• Biography on the Senate homepage
• Proof of publication ( Google Books )