Filipino senators caught plagiarising

Two Filipino lawmakers are facing ethics committee investigations for plagiarism, in a case that has drawn complaints from the daughter of the late US Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

The Senate Ethics Committee said on Thursday that it was about to start its hearings on the cases of Senators Vicente Sotto III and Pia Cayetano, who are accused of giving speeches with portions lifted verbatim from unacknowledged sources.

The two stand on opposing sides of an acrimonious senate struggle over a reproductive health, or family-planning, bill. Sotto, the senate majority leader, is widely seen as speaking for the conservative Catholic Church hierarchy in opposing the bill, while Cayetano supports it.

In August and early September, Sotto delivered speeches that he said would be an "exposé" of nefarious interests pushing for the bill's passage.

But in his attempts to do so, as Filipinos on social media swiftly uncovered, he copied key parts of his speeches from Kennedy as well as three American bloggers. Kennedy's daughter, Kerry, wrote a letter demanding an apology for what she said was Sotto's "unethical, unsanctioned theft" of her father's intellectual property.

She was particularly outraged that Sotto had used her liberal father's words to argue against access to family planning. "Using Robert Kennedy's words to stop women from having rights is really very twisted," she said.