The Philippines on a collision course

A human rights summit takes the first agonizing step toward finding solutions to the epidemic of extra-judicial killings and enforced disappearances. The solutions proposed will pit judicial activists against the forces of resistance in the executive branch and Congress.

By the Policy Study, Publication and Advocacy (PSPA)
Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG)

MANILA — Last week’s human rights summit held on July 16-17 at the Manila Hotel brought together about 250 participants in search of solutions to the epidemic of summary executions and enforced disappearance that has hounded the nation since 2001. Responding to the invitation of Supreme Court (SC) Chief Justice Reynato S. Puno, the participants included lawyers, academic scholars, human rights volunteers, legislators, interfaith leaders, press freedom advocates as well as government executives and magistrates. Conspicuous in their blue and grey uniform were elements of the military and police, led by their top honchos. The presence of some members of the diplomatic corps including a representative of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) underscored the fact that this particular domestic concern has achieved an international dimension, the likes of Rwanda and other countries plagued by human rights violations.

The summit was convened to address the deteriorating state of human rights in the country but it came as a letdown to rights watchdogs, cause-oriented organizations and interfaith groups – whose members were also victims of extra-judicial killings and enforced disappearances – who had to lobby hard on the eve of the event for them to participate.

Just the same, the summit has been lauded as “unprecedented” for having been initiated by the high court chief justice to address the pressing issue of political killings, with about 865 victims to date aside from hundreds other victims of frustrated murder and enforced disappearance committed allegedly by state security forces under the watch of President Gloria M. Arroyo. CJ Puno, in his keynote address, said the judiciary decided “to unsheathe its unused power to enact rules to protect the constitutional rights of our people, the first and foremost of which is the right to life itself.” Described as a “risk taker,” Puno has sought to marshal “judicial activism” to confront attacks on the rule of law the arrest of which, in his opinion, has failed to draw any action from the legislative and executive branches of government.

Unprecedented

In that light, the summit was indeed unprecedented. But the atrocities, where most victims were unarmed civilians collectively in their tens of thousands, have persisted - fueled no less by a culture of impunity and a fear factor - over the past 35 years or since the Marcos dictatorship, then through the various presidencies that followed, and now. The high court itself had been strongly criticized for its complicit stance during martial law and also for rulings it issued after that, such as on the warrantless arrest and military checkpoints that had shades of authoritarian justice.

Under Arroyo, the failure of the country’s criminal justice system to provide succor to the victims of crimes against humanity forced their families and human rights groups to knock at the doors of the international community for intervention. Thus it took nearly 900 killings more and 50 fallen journalists and for the diplomatic and human rights community to sound the alarm before the high court’s 15 justices would be roused from their slumber to find the atrocities as constituting not only attacks against constitutional, civil and political rights but a subversion of the rule of law.