Gov. Ralph DLG Torres said Friday that the people of the CNMI should stand up and continue to protect Article 12 of the CNMI Constitution.<\/p>\n
Article 12 was established to restrict landownership in the CNMI to persons of Northern Marianas descent, or NMD.<\/p>\n
In response to a question during a KKMP press briefing, Torres expressed his position about Article 12 not as a governor but as a father and someone who was born and raised in the CNMI.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is not about politics,\u201d said the governor, adding that it is not about his political party either.<\/p>\n
He said because land is an individual\u2019s take, every individual has rights to decide\u00a0 what he or she wants to do with his or her land.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Torres said he would like to see Article 12 maintained, as he likes to have his children transfer the land from one generation to another.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t even have one homestead out of the Northern Islands,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The governor said Article 12 is the only identity that the people of the CNMI have.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd it\u2019s\u00a0 been acknowledged by the Supreme Court and that is what we have,\u00a0 and we should hold it, maintain it,\u00a0 as long as we can,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Torres said he has no problem talking about amending Article 12.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gov. Ralph DLG Torres said Friday that the people of the CNMI should stand up…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":372646,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[94],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-375959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-headlines"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=375959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375959\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/372646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=375959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=375959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=375959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}