“I totally disagree with that. I am 100 percent satisfied with the Covenant. There’s nothing wrong with the Covenant,” said Tenorio in an interview.
Tenorio, a former governor, Washington representative and senator, said the NMI got what it bargained for when it entered into a political union with the U.S., which he described as the “greatest country in the world.”
“If anything is wrong with it (Covenant), it’s because we didn’t live up with what we were supposed to do. We didn’t take advantage of what we should receive from our relationship with the U.S,” he added.
Paul Maas Risenhoover of the Robin Hood International Human Rights Legal Defense Fund filed the case in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals regarding the Covenant’s impact on the indigenous people, particularly when the U.S. extended its immigration law to the islands on Nov. 28, 2009.
Risenhoover is also asking the International Court of Justice to declare the Covenant as null and void because it subjected the indigenous people of the NMI to “genocide” when they were “stripped of their native Indian tribal identity.”
These cases were filed on behalf of the National Chamorro Association of the Mariana Islands headed by local radio talk show host Glenn Manglona.
Risenhoover, who claims to be a lawyer, was once described as a “fraudulent opportunist” by a U.S. judge
