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BEIJING?Vice President Jejomar Binay arrived in Beijing on Friday to seek leniency for three Filipinos facing execution for drug smuggling, as President Benigno Aquino called for a national prayer vigil.
Binay went straight into a meeting with the president of China's supreme court and was also due to meet with Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Zhijun, a spokesman for the Philippine embassy in Beijing told Agence France-Presse.
Of the condemned Filipinos, a 42-year-old man and a 32-year-old woman are scheduled to be executed on Monday in the southeastern city of Xiamen. A 38-year-old woman is due to be put to death in Shenzhen on Tuesday.
China had originally rejected Philippine requests for a visit by Binay on behalf of the three drug mules, but in a surprise move late Thursday, it reversed course.
Binay said in a statement he respected the decisions of the Chinese courts but would argue during his trip to Beijing that the three deserved a lighter penalty.
"We do not condone drug trafficking. However, we believe that these Filipinos were merely victims of international drug syndicates," he said.
Aquino, meanwhile, said Friday he had sent a letter of appeal to his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao and called on all Filipinos "to unite ourselves in prayer beginning today at sundown."
"All our prayers will storm the heavens to touch the heart of God, the God who will make a way when there seems to be no way," he said in a statement.
All three Filipinos were convicted of smuggling heroin at separate trials in 2008, but Philippine officials say they were duped into their crimes and should face long prison sentences instead of execution.
The Philippines skipped the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo in December honoring Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo in an attempt to encourage Beijing to spare the lives of five Filipinos on death row, believed to include the trio.
China had been infuriated by the award of the prize to the jailed activist and pressured other countries not to attend the ceremony.
Sino-Philippine ties were tested last year by the deaths in Manila of eight tourists from the southern Chinese territory of Hong Kong, who were killed in a bungled rescue bid by Philippine police after they had been taken hostage aboard a bus.
Aquino sparked outrage in Hong Kong by later deciding to press only minor criminal charges against several police officials involved in the fiasco.
