REPOST: Statement Against Attacks on Women's Dignity

In a low-handed attempt to derail investigations into the killing of suspected drug peddlers and dependents in the country, President Duterte has accused Senator Leila de Lima of being immoral, an adulterer, with links to the illegal drugs trade. The President is especially scathing in his attacks on women critics. Not only does he hurl accusations left and right as if there are no laws on evidence governing this country, accusations against women are also painted with personal malice—something you don’t hear against male critics. Demonstrating a conduct unbecoming of a head of state, indeed, strutting like a common brute, a bully, the President resorts to name calling when he should be presenting legal arguments and facts to support his policies.
Why does he find it necessary to readily label critics before giving proof? He does it to put opposition figures in a box where he could render them not human- when labeling critics as immoral or adulterous or drug suspects, it removes their dignity, their humanity. In the eyes of society, they become a social disease that needs to be eradicated. So follows soon after, critics also become victims of the heinous crime of murder. We know too well from the labeling of Jews by the Nazis, Tutsis as “cockroaches” in Rwanda, even activists as communists by the late dictator Marcos, results the familiar massacres and other crimes against humanity. Duterte starts with unsubstantiated accusations that end in cardboard signs. We are thus gravely alarmed that if this accusations are the kind of intelligence dirty data requested and used by the President to malign and destroy his critics, what sort of harmful information is gathered and passed on regarding drug suspects to the rank and file of the PNP and/or to the local government officials and personnel to justify EJKs, as well as intensify a coercive environment and a culture of fear.
As more people begin to question his methods we expect more tirades and threats from this man. But what will go down in history are the courageous women and men that speak out against this administration’s excesses-- at the frontline are Senator de Lima and Chief Justice Sereno. iDEFEND extols their example and stand with them amidst overwhelming adversity, amidst attacks by no less than the President himself. We stand with them in the deafening silence of the rest of society. We dedicate to them these words that gave meaning to the struggle of a generation against Martial Law, by the late Lean Alejandro: “In the line of fire is a place of honor”. Mabuhay po kayo at maraming salamat po.
___________________________________________________________
In Defense of Human Rights and Dignity Movement (iDEFEND) is a growing broad coalition of non-government organizations (NGOs), people’s organizations (POs), individual HRDs, human rights lawyers, religious sector and members of the academe which came together to defend and assert human rights for all.

http://www.philippinehumanrights.org/news/11-statements/8-statement-against-attacks-on-women-s-dignity

Under the beat of the baton

In February, a few months before he would take the Philippine presidency in phenomenal fashion, Rodrigo Duterte was quoted as saying that he would grant pardon to law enforcers who might end up killing criminals while carrying out the new regime's social cleansing campaign.

This month, he repeated this statement. Only by this time, Duterte has also said he would double the pay of the members of the police force. Until that happens, the administration could significantly increase the police "hazard pay" for putting their lives on the line. Meanwhile, the drug war will continue, and any talk of an investigation into the alarming number of deaths will not be entertained.

At present, Philippine society is at war. It is officially a war against drugs -- a campaign to rid the nation of its dregs. It is being commandeered by a man we elected. And on its frontline is the national Police force, the people's supposed protector.

However, a look at the records will remind us of just what sort of institution it is that Duterte has chosen to be in the frontline of his campaign.

Just in 2014, Amnesty International published a report that reminded us about who the national Police is. “Torture is still rife, … the overwhelming majority of reports of torture involve police officers.” And yet the content of that report itself is not new. It merely put real faces into a phenomenon that is, as it wrote, the Philippine's “dark, open secret.”

Faces like those of Alfreda Disbarro, a former police asset who the police took and brought to a room. On top of her head, they placed a bottle which they threatened to blow to bits if she would not do what they wanted her to do. Later they forced a dirty mop into her mouth, while beating her on the side. They wanted Disbarro to admit to being a drug pusher.

The report presented data from the Commission on Human Rights which has recorded a total of 457 cases of torture all over the Philippines since 2001. The highest figure was in 2013 when 75 torture cases were reported, 60 of which implicated the Police. The Philippines passed an Anti-Torture Law in 2009. Not a single person in authority has been convicted.

That report pointed out that, to begin with, cases involving the police are underreported and almost undocumented. But in 2010, another report, from The Asia Foundation, stated another kind of police involvement in condemnable acts that cast doubt on their supposed job description of protecting the citizens – extrajudicial killings.

Like the AI report, their data were likewise gathered from 2001, until 2010. They recorded 390 victims of extrajudicial killings. Of the 837 suspects, 9% were attributed to the Police – third only to the military, another state actor, and the New People's Army.

But in fact the hand of the police is tainted even in deaths attributed to the armed forces. Highlighting a similarity with another country whose main killers were police death squads, Kenya, the report noted that victims killed in the Philippines were identified beforehand and killed in remote areas after being detained first by the police. Majority of the victims in the Philippines were identified as legal political activists – activists who first get handcuffed by the police and get brought to their stations.


What is the Police, and who does it serve? In the Philippines, it traces its roots in the Spanish civil guards whose cruelty toward Filipinos the national hero Jose Rizal depicted in his books. But the current police force as we know it descends from the Philippine Constabulary, an institution which co-emerged with American rule in the country. Thus, in the Philippines, policing has in fact functioned as a tool of foreign oppression against the natives.

When the colonizers left, its control was handed over to the local ruling elites. It was the same PC that the dictator Ferdinand Marcos would inherit and would use efficiently. After Marcos was thrown out, police control was handed over to the Department of Interior and Local Government, occasionally figuring in scandals ("Euro Generals" corruption case; the Maguindanao Massacre) and from time to time showing its ineptness, as in the botched rescue mission of Hong Kong bus hostages in Manila in 2010.

The police has been a feared figure in the everyday lives of Filipinos -- a steady presence that exists to protect the ruling elite's banks and malls, and who disperse political rallies against the Philippine's social ills.

The Police has been understood as “an instrument for regulating the lower orders.” As such, it is an institution of force. But according to Richard Seymour, properly understanding the role of the police has to take into account what exactly it defends: “What they're doing is exerting violence and coercion not only in defense of the legal and juridical forms of capitalist social relations, but in the defense of a moral and symbolic order, which expresses their own relationships to the dominant ideology, to the institutions they work in, the (professional middle) class they belong to, and to the social world they police.”

A violent social order where the poorest families – millions of them – subsist on P5,750 every month and the richest families earn ten times as much, breeds instability -- and more violence. And the police is a violent state element precisely because it was designed to be so.

But if the police, on an average day, already exhibit these tendencies. What it could do under the guise of the drug war, and in the hands of Duterte, points only to a more anti-people trajectory.

Already, the numbers are troubling. According to the Citizen's Council for Human Rights, from January 1 to May 9 this year, prior to Duterte's election, number of reported deaths from drug-related violence was 39. After May 10, in just two months, this number has risen to 251.

And who are the victims? Those we know of paint a grim picture. Stories like those of Jefferson Bunuan, a scholar of a local NGO who was brutally killed in a "buy-bust" operation. A criminology student, he dreamed of being a policeman. Stories in the Philippine social media of people arrested just because they "looked like" the bad guy.

Already, the groundwork for a regime where especially the shabby-clothed, the tattooed, the un-schooled, the different, the people with the least capability to defend themselves -- are easily carted off to numberless rooms by gun- and baton-wielding men in uniform. They have a name for this. This is called “law enforcement.” Meanwhile, the public cheers and eggs the president on, reveling in the new-found “peace and order,” which is in fact nothing more than the slow surrender of all our freedoms as a civilized people. The country is dancing into lawlessness, and the Police and other armed men are keeping the beat.

Because early on, Rodrigo Duterte himself has shown how little his regard is for the concept of “human rights.” When the police he leads swoops down on  another poverty-stricken community to smoke out the drug den, the right of supposed suspects to not get whacked, to not get arrested without charges, to be presumed innocent at first – to just be respected as human beings – will not be nearest their minds.

If President Rodrigo Duterte is really serious in helping build a fairer Philippine society, he should stop emboldening and empowering the very same forces that threaten the masses.

Meanwhile, we have to study another form of society – one that does not use force and brutality just so it could impose order amidst the inequalities of Capitalism.

REPOST: Extra Judicial Killings: Normalizing Criminality Under the Guise of Peace and Order

(Read the original here.)

The Citizen’s Council for Human Rights (CCHR) strongly condemns the escalating number of killings of suspected drug pushers and drug dependents who said to have died either during so-called legitimate police operations or at the hands of unknown gunmen.

The surge in fatalities is too alarming to be ignored: from January 1 to May 9 this year (129 days), reported deaths from drug-related violence was 39. But the death count suddenly swelled after May 10. In a matter of 64 days, 251 deaths have already been reported. What makes these spate of executions most worrisome is that this was prompted by President Duterte’s pronouncements, made even before his assumption into office, that urged the police, ordinary citizens and later, the New Peoples Army to kill all those involved in the illegal drug trade, with the promise that he would shield them against any legal consequences.

Coming from the Chief Executive himself, this declaration legitimizes a system of crime response where the police and regular citizens become prosecutors, judges and executioners. The Criminal Justice System provides safeguards to protect suspected offenders and all citizens against arbitrary acts through transparency, and checks and balances. The arbitrary killing of suspects bypasses this system altogether,infringes on fundamental due process tenets and denies people the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

The social costs and dangers of arbitrary methods should not be underestimated. The disregard of safeguards endangers everyone in Philippine society: anyone can now be accused of any crime or involvement in illegal drugs and be executed before and without having a chance to publicly defend themselves in court.There is no reason why these violations will not extend to law abiding citizens and human rights and environmental defenders, as in the case of Gloria Capitan, grandmother and campaigner for her community’s environmental rights.

Human Rights organizations and the CHR have spent over three decades sensitizing security forces on Human Rights values and ideals, but these efforts are about to be for naught.

Besides, Extra Judicial Executions, the Duterte administration’s war on drugs has inspired other excesses. At least one woman and a child has been sexually harassed in the course of operations. On many occasions, suspected drug peddlers and drug dependents, before having their day in court, are paraded in public places.

Apart from being an affront to the dignity of persons and their loved ones, shame campaigns and sexual harassment also undermine the well-being of communities and Philippine society in general. Such acts, categorized as psychological torture is prohibited by the Anti-Torture Act of 2009 or RA 9745. By allowing such illegal acts by authorities,we contribute to the culture haphazard, harmful and arbitrary dispensation of justice. Local Executives should treat drug dependents with compassion and facilitate their rehabilitation while ensuring that those involved in the drug trade are brought to justice through legitimate processes.

The Citizen’s Council for Human Rights does not believe these methods which deliberately violate the right to life, right to dignity and due process, will solve the country’s crime and illegal drugs problem. In fact, the social costs and dangers of employing extra-legal methods are high.
Finally, CCHR calls on the Duterte government to:

1. Immediately stop the killings of suspected criminals and drug related offenders. Law enforcement authorities and government officials should abide by our criminal justice system, by securing warrants prior to arrest, strict observance of police rules of engagement and maximum tolerance in the arrest of suspects, filing of appropriate cases and bringing them to the BJMP without harm and allowing them to stand trial. The killing of suspects outside the rule of law is palliative and does not tackle the core of the crime and drug problems.
2. Strictly prohibit LGU Executives and law enforcement units from implementing torture and dehumanizing methods in the fight against crime and drugs. The listing of and knocking on houses of persons suspected of peddling and using drugs to as well as the “walks of shame” destroy the humanity of persons and their families. These individuals are also deprived of their right to due process and to reintegrate with their communities with dignity.
3. Professionalize and raise the human rights and respect for the rule of law standards of the PNP, PDEA, NBI and other law enforcement agencies and rid their ranks of those involved in corruption and syndicated crime. The most professional and efficient law enforcement agencies in the world are those which have solid human rights foundations and those that strictly adhere to the very laws they are tasked to uphold. Strict adherence to the Rule of Law, institutional safeguards and respect for human rights must be the cornerstones of Philippine law enforcement modernization and professionalization.
4. Review and reform the criminal justice system and root out corruption in the prosecution service, courts, the BJMP and the Bucor as soon as possible with the view of making the whole system prompt and efficient in dispensing justice and reforming persons.
5. Institute mechanisms widely accessible to ordinary Filipinos so that corruption, involvement in crime, violations to the rule of law and due process as well as extra judicial killings and other grave excesses can be promptly reported to relevant institutions.
6. Review and reconsider state policy on drug addiction and make available and accessible proper drug rehabilitation programs and facilities to the majority of drug dependents who come from the poor. Drug dependents are persons who are ill and are victims of addictive substances. While the manufacture and sale of drugs are crimes, drug addiction is not. Drug abuse is a public health issue and it should be the DOH and its counterpart units at the LGU handling drug rehabilitation programs and facilities, not corrections officials. 60% of those in Philippine jails and penal institutions are incarcerated due to drug offenses under the Dangerous Drugs Act of 2009 or RA 9165; these are people who need proper treatment.
7. Invest in the realization of a life of dignity for all. Essential services such as education, health, housing, food and the commons such as water and electricity and other basic needs which people need to get out of poverty and become productive members of Philippine society, should be democratized. These requirements of a life of dignity provide people with economic and social opportunities, enabling them to pave their way out of often unbearable conditions which engender anti-social values and behavior. We should address the roots of rampant crime and extensive drug trade and abuse as well as many other social problems by stamping out poverty and social idleness. These social levelers include a good public education which exists for the benefit of public order. Currently, we waste human resources because so many in poor communities are unskilled, when they could contribute to nation building. When all in Philippine society enjoy a productive life of dignity, there will be few left who are prone and vulnerable to dysfunctional behavior or predisposed to a life of crime and drugs.
8. Halt all initiatives toward the reimposition of the Death Penalty and the lowering of the age of discernment.
9. Investigate and prosecute the authorities responsible for human rights violations in the course of the drug war implementation. Justice must be served to the families of those killed, tortured and to those who suffered from sexual harassment.

Stop the killings and shame campaigns! No to vigilantism!

Address the root cause of social problems!

Bring offenders to justice through due process and the rule of law!

CCHR is a broad coalition of non-government organizations (NGOs), people’s organizations (POs), human rights lawyers, religious sector and members of the academe that came together to defend and assert human rights for all.