In Paper to UN Rights Council, Germans Decry Abuses

The following is an aide memoire on the Philippine human rights written by the Philippine bureau of the Forum Menschenrechte (FMR), a network of human rights NGOs in Germany. The paper has been handed over to the German foreign ministry for consideration of the German delegates to the UN Human Rights Council.

While the Philippines are state party to most of the important UN human rights conventions and treaties, their implementation is not a policy priority. Human rights violations continue to be grave and widespread: Despite the declared willingness of the Philippine Government to resolve these issues, politically motivated killings and enforced disappearances perpetrated by alleged security forces personnel are continuing.

Political Situation

Since March 2005 the government of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has been suffering a continuous political crisis after evidence of electoral fraud, massive corruption of public funds and widespread violations of human rights surfaced. Despite numerous political challenges from the opposition and a defeat in the senatorial elections of 2007, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo could repel political challenges to her presidency in 2007. In November 2007 newly elected senator Antonio Trillianes IV and a group of 30 military officers staged a failed coup attempt at a luxury hotel in Manila. However, family members of the President have allegedly been involved in various corruption scandals, such as the National Broadband Network (NBN) deal: A senate probe is currently investigating allegations that First Husband Mike Arroyo demanded 130 Million US-Dollars kickbacks for brokering the project.

Facing constant opposition and threats of public uprising and military coups, the Arroyo government has resorted to subterfuge and obfuscation, as well as taken control by infringing on civil liberties and by forming alliances with the military. There are now more than two dozen high ranking civil servants and government officials with a former military or police background in various government institutions.

A general erosion of respect for the law and the failure of the state to identify, bring to trial and sentence human rights violators continue to determine the human rights situation. This climate of impunity has over the past two years been well documented by investigations of local NGOs, such as Partnership for Agrarian Reform and Rural Development Services, Inc. (PARRDS), Citizen’s Council for Human Rights (CCHR), international organisations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch as well as the UN Special Rappoteurs on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, Prof. Philip Alston, as well as Prof. Rodolfo Stavenhagen, UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples.

While some cosmetic improvements to the normative environment of human rights legislation have been initiated by the executive department, the real problem – the lack of implementation of existing laws and the climate of impunity – is still not being tackled: In 2007 it was the supreme court, who has taken a leading role in searching for solutions regarding extrajudicial executions, while the presidency remains mostly inactive regarding human rights. On 16-17 July 2007 Supreme Justice Puno invited all sectors concerned to a National Consultative Summit on Extrajudicial Killings and Enforced Disappearances. Most speakers on the summit were convinced that parts of the security forces are responsible for the killings, while the presentations by Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) General Hermogenes C. Esperon as well as General Oscar C. Calderon, Director General of the Philippine National Police (PNP) refused to acknowledge the responsibilities of security forces in many politically motivated killings and enforced disappearances. The Supreme Court, however, operates vis-à-vis a Justice Department strongly affiliated with the executive.

The confidence of the population in the rule of law has in turn been seriously damaged. Facing political instability, the president has a) shied away from the implementation of crucial reforms in the justice system and b) exacerbated the human rights situation through its handling of the current political crisis.

Extrajudicial Executions and Enforced Disappearances

Two underlying main causes for many extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances, as identified by Prof. Philip Alston in February 2007, have still not been addressed by the government. These are:

a) “the characterization [by security forces] of most groups on the left of the political spectrum as ‘front organizations’ for armed groups, particularly the New People’s Army (NPA)
b) “the extent to which aspects of the government’s counter-insurgency strategy encourage or facilitate the extrajudicial killings of activists and other ‘enemies’.” (Prof. Philip Alston, A/HRC/4/20/Add.3)

The number of politically motivated killings involving security personnel is highly contested. The Philippine Daily Inquirer reported 296 killings of political activists between January 2001 and 22 June 2007 (1).

The NGO Karapatan documented 836 politically motivated killings between January 2001 and 14 November 2006, as well as 68 killings between 1 January and 31 October 2007. Of those, the police unit Task Force Usig, created in 2006 to investigate political killings, discarded all but 116 “valid” cases of killed political activists and journalists by 30 August 2007. (2) Considering the great number of election-related killings documented by the Philippine National Police (PNP) in 2004 and 2007, 148 and 121 cases respectively, the low figure of cases declared valid by Task Force Usig seems illusive. Moreover, its inquiry lays the blame for most of the killings on the NPA, while identifying only 11 cases with military personnel as suspects or perpetrators (3): This scenario of a present internal purge within the Philippine left responsible for the increasing number of extrajudicial executions has been widely dismissed as propaganda by human rights NGOs and investigative missions into the killings. (4) There is also an inconsistency of the Task Force Usig data with other official datasets: Between January 2005 and December 2006 alone there were 72 cases of murder where military personnel are the alleged perpetrators filed with the Commission on Human Rights (5). In January 2008 six further cases were reported by human rights organisations and in Philippine news reports. In June 2007, three anonymous generals reported about a top-level military conference in Luzon in 2005, during which extrajudicial executions were openly discussed as a response to the communist insurgency. Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye as well as Secretary Norberto Gonzales dismissed the reports as “unverifiable” and chose not to comment on anonymous an unverifiable information. (6)