Manila: Australian nun Sister Patricia Fox can remain in the Philippines for now after the country's Justice Department overturned an order for her deportation. Justice Department Secretary Menardo Guevarra on Monday determined that the cancellation of her missionary visa was without legal basis. Sister Patricia Fox. Credit:AP Fox, 71, from the Sisters of Our Lady of Sion, was arrested on April 16 and detained for 22 hours for purportedly being involved in partisan political protests. She was subsequently ordered to leave the Philippines by May 25, but Guevarra announced a reprieve on the day of the deadline pending a review of her case.<doc-sep>MANILA — The Philippine Justice Department has nullified an order to deport an Australian nun who was arrested after joining street protests criticizing President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal war on drugs. The justice secretary, Menardo Guevarra, said the order expelling Sister Patricia Fox, 71, was “without legal basis” because the Bureau of Immigration did not explicitly have the power to declare her visa forfeit. “What the B.I. did in this case is beyond what the law provides — that is why it has to be struck down,” Mr. Guevarra said. He said that withdrawing Sister Fox’s visa without any legal basis was tantamount to creating “new procedures or new grounds.”<doc-sep>There were tears of relief and joy at Sister Patricia Fox’s modest home in Quezon City, the Philippines, after it was announced her appeal against the withdrawal of her missionary visa had been successful. But the 71-year-old Australian nun remains under threat of deportation under a separate action that is still before the authorities and pending a decision. Late on Monday the Department of Justice announced that the Bureau of Immigration had erred in cancelling Fox’s missionary visa on the grounds of her political activism. Fox’s visa is now valid until September, when it expires. She plans to apply for a renewal. The decision came as a shock to Fox and her lawyers, who earlier in the day were making plans for the opposite result. Fox said she was immensely relieved and “I nearly burst into tears. My fellow sisters are laughing and crying.” She said she would now unpack the bag that she has had awaiting a variety of possibilities, including jailing, deportation or “going to ground”. The secretary of the Department of Justice, Menardo Guevarra, earlier told the local Inquirer newspaper that the decision on Fox would be made on its merits, and that President Rodrigo Duterte had personally assured him that he would not interfere. He also said he had not sought guidance from the president. Fox’s lawyer, Jobart Pahliga, said that the decision was a “huge” victory not only for Fox but for the rule of law in the Philippines. He said the legal team was not yet dropping its guard, but was now optimistic that Fox would be able to stay at least until September. Sign up to receive the top stories every morning Sign up to receive the top stories every morning “We had assumed that because the president had acted against her that the Department would just go along with his whims,” he said. He said that the decision would also affect another 15 similar cases where the Bureau of Immigration had withdrawn visas from foreign nationals because of political activism. Most of those people had already been deported. “Without the outpouring of international support for Sister Fox none of this would have happened.” Before the decision, Pahliga said he had advised Fox not to go into hiding but instead to appear as prominently as possible in public. This morning she was addressing an ecumenical conference of bishops in central Manila. This evening she plans to attend a memorial service for Father Richmond Nilo, who was gunned down in front of his congregation eight days ago in a chapel in Zaragosa, in the province of Nueva Ecija, while preparing for mass. Nilo was the third priest to be killed in six months in the escalating tide of gun violence in the Philippines. Fox, who has been a missionary in the Philippines for 28 years, was arrested on the personal order of Duterte on 16 April and threatened with deportation, following her participation in a human rights fact-finding mission in the southern island of Mindanao earlier that month. Later, her missionary visa was cancelled by the Bureau of Immigration. It is this latter decision that has now been overturned. The deportation order has also been appealed, but no decision has been made. Pahliga said it was not out of the question that Fox might be deported, but that if the government understood its own rules, this should not happen while there was an active appeal, and he now thought it unlikely. “If they do deport her, where is the rule of law in the Philippines today?” he said. Mindanao has been placed under martial law by Duterte on the grounds of terrorist threats from Islamic State sympathisers and the New People’s Army, the armed wing of the Communist Party. The fact-finding mission of which Sister Fox was part reported stories of extra-judicial killings of farmers, the violent breakup of unionism at the Coca Cola factory in Davao, and that Indigenous people and local peasants were being forced from their land to make way for mines and palm oil and banana plantations. The mission also heard that peasants were being forced into false confessions that they were members of the New People’s Army. Meanwhile the Catholic bishops’ conference of the Philippines this morning announced that it would not support allowing priests to carry guns in the wake of the recent shootings of priests Archbishop Romulo Valles said that arming priests was contrary to the teachings of Jesus to shun violence and “turn the other cheek”. Four days before Nilo was killed, Father Rey Urmenata was shot and wounded in Calamb City, Laguna province. In April Father Mark Ventura, known for his advocacy against mining, was gunned down and killed in Cagayan province. In December last year Father Marcelito Paez was shot dead in Jaen town, Nueva Ecija, after helping with the release of a political prisoner. The Catholic bishops also released a statement regarding the killing last year of three teenagers in the so-called “war on drugs”. These cases, three among many, have caught the public’s imagination partly because of the youth of the victims, and partly because in one case CCTV footage and eyewitness statements contradicted the police version of events. Police claimed that Kian Loyd Delos Santos, 17, of Caloocan City, shot at them and was killed in self defence in August last year during a drug raid, but witnesses have claimed they saw police detain and restrain him, drag him in to a laneway and shoot him in the head. Two other Caloocan City teenagers, Carl Angelo Arnaiz, 19, and Reynaldo de Guzman, 14, were discovered dead within weeks of Delos Santos’s killing. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference released said in a statement “we are appalled by the remorselessness by which even the young are executed … The relentless and bloody campaign against drugs, that shows no sign of abating, impels your bishops to declare: ‘in the name of God stop the killings’.”<doc-sep>
An Australian nun who was facing deportation has won her appeal against the Philippines Bureau of Immigration, after her visa was forfeited over alleged "political activities". Sister Patricia Fox was arrested in April after taking part in an international fact-finding mission to the Island of Mindenao, following reports local farmers were being tortured and killed. The 71-year-old nun appealed to the country's Department of Justice, and just hours before she was due to be sent packing she received word she had won. "I feel very relieved now. Almost ecstatic actually. After waiting and waiting and waiting it was amazing," Sister Fox said. The Secretary of Justice, Menardo I Guevarra, declared the order that Sister Fox's visa be revoked was "without legal basis", saying the Bureau of Immigration did not have the power to order the forfeiture. "The Department of Justice has nullified the orders issued by the Bureau of Immigration, which forfeited the missionary visa of Sister Patricia Anne Fox, and directed her to leave the country in 30 days," a department press statement said. There is still a chance the Bureau could try again to have her deported if it can build a case against her — but Sister Fox believes her win is a positive sign. "The basis they used for cancellation is same basis for the deportation so I think there's a strong message there," she said. Sister Fox's visa was officially revoked last month when her work outside a village in Quezon City was determined to violate the terms of her missionary visa. She was told she had 30 days to leave the country. Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte personally ordered Sister Fox be investigated for what he called "illegal political activities". After the Justice Department's ruling, Sister Fox thanked her supporters in the Philippines, Australia and around the world, but said her fight to continue supporting some of the country's most downtrodden people is not over. "I've been here for a long time now and I've got very fond of the people here," she said. "I find a lot of purpose in what I'm doing here [in the Philippines] so I would like to continue." She has been living in the Philippines and working with the poor for almost three decades.