Human rights violator repackaged as pitiful victim before UN

At the obvious behest of her local lawyers, former president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s running to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD), a special mechanism under the UN’s labyrinthian human rights system, is essentially repackaging a violator of human rights into a pitiful victim.

Yet what has the UN said so far? Let’s have a flashback.

In 2007, the UN Special Rapporteur on Arbitrary, Summary and Extrajudicial Executions, Prof. Philip Alston, indicted the Arroyo administration for gross, vicious and systematic violations of human rights, saying as well that the military, under her command, was in a “state of denial” for the killing, disappearance, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention of hundreds of innocent civilians.

In 2008, the UN Human Rights Committee, made up of 18 international experts, who are independent persons of high moral character and recognized competence in the field of human rights, held the Arroyo administration and her poster boy for impunity, Jovito Palparan, then a colonel, guilty of violating the rights of human rights defenders Eden Marcellana and Eddie Gumanoy, based on a 2006 complaint filed with the help of Karapatan.

The committee found that the Arroyo administration violated the right to life of every person, the right to liberty and security of persons and the rights to effective remedies under the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

And we are not even talking of the credible and independent findings of the International People’s Tribunal and the Citizen’s Council for Truth and Accountability in 2005 in Manila, and the Permanent People’s Tribunal in 2007 in the Hague. All international tribunals found lawyer Amal Clooney’s client manifestly guilty of perpetuating human rights violations under her watch.

Hence, people, especially the victims, are asking in awe: Was the complaint filed by Clooney before the WGAD sloppy work or big bucks? Or was Arroyo’s international lawyer really clueless or even duped? No matter.

Indeed, how many were detained then? And still detained until now? It’s one thing to have a right to a counsel of one’s choice. Or the prerogative, if not the duty, to choose one’s client no matter how evil or despicable. Arroyo is after all entitled to a counsel, a right deprived by her and her minions to many during her time when she was strutting like an arrogant queen. Her complaint in the UN would rise and fall on procedural and substantive grounds.

But it’s another thing to say that Arroyo is a victim. If so, will another famous, glitzy and putatively best international lawyer that

money can buy be hired, if not exploited, to repackage President Aquino as the paragon of good government and ardent protector of human rights when he becomes the next pathetic “victim” of a slew of cases that is coming his way? That would be a looney thing to do.

Our hearts cry especially for all the women, sick and elderly in prison. But please,

Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, come to court with clean hands.

—EDRE U. OLALIA,

secretary general,

National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers,

[email protected]