The late Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago. File



MANILA - President Rodrigo Duterte will confer on late senator Miriam Defensor Santiago the Quezon Service Cross, the highest award the republic accords its civil servants.

The conferment will take place in Malacañang on Monday, Dec. 3, according to a schedule of the President released Friday.

Duterte, who had amiable interactions with Santiago during the May 2016 presidential campaign where they stood as opponents, nominated the late senator for the award last year.

Senators Grace Poe and Sonny Angara earlier filed separate resolutions "urging" the President to confer the award on Santiago, who had "dedicated her life to public service through her work in all the branches of government: judicial, executive, and legislative."

"As a Senator for three terms, Santiago consistently filed the highest number of bills and resolutions," Poe's resolution read.

Angara, meanwhile, noted in his resolution how Santiago, in 5 decades of public service, had "exemplified academic, professional, and moral excellence - values that she herself demanded not just from fellow public servants, but also fellow Filipinos."

According to the Official Gazette, the Quezon Service Cross is unique in that the President nominates Filipino citizens for the award, and the conferment has to be approved by Congress.

There have been at least five recipients of the Quezon Service Cross since its creation in 1946: revolutionary Emilio Aguinaldo, diplomat Carlos P. Romulo, the late President Ramon Magsaysay, slain Senator and martial law opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr., and the late Interior Secretary Jesse Robredo.

Santiago, known for her fiery and impassioned interpellations at the Senate and funny pickup lines in speeches, spent much of her life in public service.

She launched another presidential bid in the 2016 polls but lost to Duterte. She passed away September last year after a bout with lung cancer.

Before entering politics, Santiago served as presiding judge of the Quezon City Regional Trial Court, immigration commissioner, and agrarian reform secretary. She then served as senator from 1995 to 2001 and from 2004 to 2016.

Among laws Santiago authored were the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act, The Data Privacy Act, The Cybercrime Prevention Act, The Anti-Enforced or Involuntary Disappearance Act, The Anti-Bullying Act, An Act Restructuring the Excise Tax on Alcohol and Tobacco Products, The Fair Competition Law, The Intellectual Property Code, The Oil Pollution Compensation Act, The Biofuels Act, The Anti-Torture Act, and the The Magna Carta of Women.

Santiago was the first Filipino to be elected judge of the International Criminal Court (ICC), based in The Hague, Netherlands, in 2011. She, however, let go of her post in 2014 due to chronic fatigue syndrome.

The tough-talking senator also received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the Asian equivalent of the Nobel Prize, in 1988 when she was chief of the Bureau of Immigration "for bold and moral leadership in cleaning up a graft-ridden government agency."