We cannot perhaps add anything more to the universal condemnation of, and loud calls for justice for, the grisly murder of Jennifer Laude. There is no legal or moral justification for an apparent hate crime.
Yet the Aquino administration is failing us—again. It is not standing up for its own people despite the horrible beastly murder. It is simply pathetic as it grovels for the custody of the suspect. It bellows grandiosely that it has legal jurisdiction over a suspect, yet it peeps with a whimper over a simple exercise of custody?
And the United States is flouting all laws of decency and humanity for its own military interests. Shielding US Marine PFC Joseph Scott Pemberton is unmitigated callousness.
What if it were an American transgender and a Filipino soldier?
The nexus between the scandalously one-sided “agreements” that institutionalize and legalize what are essentially master-slave arrangements (like the so-called Visiting Forces Agreement and the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement) on the one hand, and the transgressions against our sovereignty, our laws, our environment, our dignity as a people and as human beings, on the other hand, is patent as it is overt.
From Subic to Tubbataha, from Daniel Smith to Pemberton: It is one straight path to subservience and docility, sanctified by legal gobbledygook and discombobulated by legal hermeneutics.
We told you so. These and other outrageous things are bound to happen. And will happen again.
But we will tell you again and again and again and again. Until lowly life forms camouflaged in elegant uniforms are brought to us for reckoning. Until America respects us as a people. Until Americans treat us as human beings.
—EDRE U. OLALIA,
secretary general,
National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers,
nupl2007@gmail.com