Marelyn Manalo is Filipino citizen. She married a Japanese national.

Years later, while in Japan, she filed for divorce against her husband. The Japanese court granted the divorce and dissolved their marriage.

Upon return to the Philippines, Manalo sought recognition of the Japanese divorce decree and asked that the marriage entry in the civil registry be cancelled. She also wanted to regain the legal capacity to remarry.

The trial court denied her petition. According to the trial court, Philippine law does not allow Filipinos to obtain a divorce, whether they are married to fellow Filipinos or foreigners. Since Manalo herself initiated the divorce proceedings, the court ruled that the divorce could not be recognized in the Philippines. This was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court.

If a Filipino is married to a foreigner and the Filipino spouse is the one who files for divorce abroad, can that divorce still be recognized in the Philippines?

Yes. The Court explained that Article 26 of the Family Code was enacted to prevent an absurd situation. The law was intended to avoid a circumstance where the foreign spouse is already free to remarry under his or her national law while the Filipino spouse remains trapped in a marriage that effectively no longer exists.

According to the Court, the law does not require that the foreign spouse be the one who initiated the divorce proceedings. What matters is that a valid divorce was obtained abroad and that the foreign spouse became legally capable of remarrying. Once that happens, the Filipino spouse should likewise be allowed to remarry.

The Court emphasized that a Filipino who files for divorce abroad is in essentially the same situation as a Filipino whose foreign spouse files for divorce. In both cases, the marriage has been dissolved under foreign law, and the foreign spouse is no longer married. It would be unfair and unreasonable to treat the two Filipinos differently merely because one happened to file the case first.

However, it is important to note that the party seeking recognition in the Philippines must still prove both the existence of the foreign divorce decree and the foreign law that authorized the divorce and allowed the foreign spouse to remarry. Foreign laws are not automatically known to Philippine courts and must be properly proven through evidence.

For this reason, although the Supreme Court agreed with Manalo’s legal position, it sent the case back to the trial court so that evidence regarding Japanese divorce law could be formally presented.

Republic of the Philippines v. Marelyn Manalo. G.R. No. 221029, April 24, 2018