This was the top-of-mind step that Ian Fry, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights in the context of climate change, urged the Philippine government to take as he wound up a 10-day official visit in the country last Wednesday.
At two world institutions, the United Nations and the Vatican, despite obstacles, momentous changes are on the way: changes that would ensure women equal rights with men to be elected heads of their policy-making and executive bodies.
“It was a period of unmitigated tyranny and corruption in our history that we must never forget and, more importantly, must never allow to happen again.” That was the core message – reflected on t-shirts, flyers, placards and streamers – that human rights defenders reiterated as protesters across the nation once more recalled Ferdinand Marcos…
Following Marcos Jr.’s approval of the National Security Policy (NSP) 2023-2028 on Aug. 12, progressive people’s organizations and the human rights community are increasingly protesting the continued threats, including red-tagging, vilification and actual attacks on the country’s human rights defenders and activists.
For many years, scientists and environmental advocates have cautioned the government against approving more proposals for land reclamation and coastal development projects in Manila Bay. The historic bay, they emphasize, is unsuitable for such projects because of the risks posed by floods, intensified typhoon-induced storm surges and other related consequences.
It’s generally conceded that the Philippine criminal justice system grinds exceedingly slow. But for the Marcos Jr. administration, the system has been working well after just one year of the family’s being back in Malacañang.
Sometimes, people just throw up their hands and shake their heads dejectedly: “But what can you do?” But often there’s really no alternative but to fight back, to push back. It happened again, twice, this week.
Human rights violations, highlighted by extrajudicial killings and questionable arrests, detention and filing of nonbailable trumped-up charges following red-tagging, continued during the first year of Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s occupation of Malacañang.
Finally, describing the case as of “transcendental importance,” the Supreme Court affirmed its Jan. 10, 2023 decision declaring as unconstitutional and void a tripartite agreement for Joint Marine Seismic Undertaking (JMSU), signed in 2005 by the Philippine government with the governments of China and Vietnam.
In the early 2000s, government soldiers brutally killed a couple, Expedito and Manuela Albarillo, in a surprise attack on their home in San Teodoro, Mindoro Oriental. Their bodies, mutilated by the intense gunfire, were dragged out of their house by the perpetrators, later identified as Philippine Army soldiers commanded by then Col. Jovito Palparan Jr.
Almost a year after taking office, the new administration hasn’t taken any perceptible step towards making decisive, positive changes in the country’s dismal human rights situation. This is a major long-festering national malaise that Ferdinand Marcos Jr. seems to be determined to ignore.