PHILIPPINE Ambassador to the United Kingdom and former Foreign Affairs secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr is facing disbarment case with Supreme Court.
The case pertains to a now-deleted post he posted on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), which was perceived as promoting violence against Palestinian children.
The disbarment case was initiated by 1Bansa Party-list, citing allegations of “incitement to genocide, promotion of Islamophobia, and dissemination of hate speech” against Locsin, according to a news report on abogado.ph
In their statement, the party-list declared, ” We were pushed to file this case because no institution had acted to impose accountability. We have to counter Atty. Locsin’s vicious narrative of Islamophobia hate speech and rethoric with this legal action.”
The removal of the controversial post by Locsin and his subsequent issuance of a conditional apology, specifying that it was intended for those who may have “misunderstood (his) sentiments and felt provoked,” were regarded as inconsequential by the party-list.
They stressed that they interpreted the original message as a clear instance of highly inappropriate language that perpetuated Islamophobic hate speech.
The group unequivocally condemned and repudiated the propagation of such hateful Islamophobic rhetoric, urging an end to this form of bigotry.
Locsin tweeted about Palestinian children caught in the reignited conflict between Israel and the Islamist group Hamas.
Part of Locsin’s now-deleted post on X read: “That’s why Palestinian children should be killed; they might grow up to become as gullible as innocent Palestinians letting Hamas launch rockets at Israel. Not that they could stop them but that’s no excuse.”
But in his subsequent post on X, Locsin apologized for the statements, saying they were made only as a “sarcastic response” to another post.
“I immediately deleted my sarcastic response to a tweet as I realized it could be misconstrued and retweeted to incite,” he said
“My apologies to those who did misconstrue my sentiments and did in fact get triggered—I obviously was not advocating for the literal death of anyone, but rather simply for the end of any ideology that condones terrorism in any way, shape or form,” he added.
