Many brickbats have been thrown the way of Justice Secretary Leila de Lima by certain quarters for her resolute opposition to allowing former president Gloria Arroyo to leave abroad for medical treatment for a claimed bone disease, and she even faces a possible contempt charge from the Supreme Court itself for ignoring its temporary restraining order on her watch-list order.

But from where we stand, she should be commended instead for standing her ground and insisting that legal processes be followed.

What’s odd, from what we gather, is that Mr and Mrs. Arroyo were apparently the first to be provided a copy of the SC TRO.

De Lima got hold of the copy of the SC decision at past 8 p.m. last Tuesday, or hours after they had already gone to NAIA to take a flight before they were stopped by Immigration agents from leaving.

That’s not the only odd thing about the TRO.

The SC reached a decision at the lightning speed of one month from receiving a petition for a TRO from the Arroyos. Judging from the excruciatingly slow pace of the wheels of justice in this country, the SC may have set a record of sorts.

Chief Justice Renato Corona is even said to have dropped everything and cut short a trip abroad just so he could take part in the deliberations. And with Corona leading the charge, seven other fellow Arroyo appointees did what was expected of them: allow their benefactor to leave the country.

And that’s not the end of it. The justices had set November 22 to  hear oral arguments on the case. Yet they couldn’t wait one more week to hear the side of the Justice department and Office of the Solicitor General and decided last November 15 to issue the TRO. In short, they didn’t even respect their own rules.

Good thing that De Lima is there to thwart any attempt to short-circuit judicial processes and to defend the public interest.

And good thing that the Justice department is there to ensure that the ends of justice are met, not foiled at every turn, as what happened during the previous administration.

Filipinos deserve to obtain the justice they had long been denied by the Arroyo regime. 

GMA’s lawyers claim that she is being harassed as an ordinary person and that she is merely defending the right to travel of ordinary people. But we all know that she is not an ordinary person.

Were she an ordinary person, could she have posted a cash bond of P2 million to ensure that she would come back from abroad?

Were she an ordinary person, could she have the money to book six  separate flights out of the country just hours after the SC issued a TRO in her favor?

She’s not an ordinary person at all because she faces not less than 20 cases of graft, plunder, and electoral fraud.

GMA wants to leave the country to avoid prosecution. That’s the long and the short of it. Her camp should stop spinning wild tales about political persecution by the Aquino administration because the complaints against her are of her own making: NBN-ZTE, the fertilizer deal, the second-hand helicopters sold to the PNP, “Hello Garci,”  and many more.

Flight is an admission of guilt. And it’s good that the DoJ  under De Lima is doing its job and preventing Arroyo from leaving the country until she faces the charges against her in a court of law.

We know the lady DoJ chief is made of sterner stuff. Still, we’d lile to remind her she has friends who support her crusade.