Violation of human rights still continuing

Having marked the 65th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) last month and seeing no signs that the rights situation in the country promises to be better in 2014, the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers indicts President Aquino for the continuing human rights violations still being committed with impunity and for his nonchalant attitude toward the injustice done to the victims and their families.

Extrajudicial killings, disappearances, illegal arrests, torture, violent demolitions and dispersals, labelling, political persecution continue. With outstanding hypocrisy, the President and his administration kiss up to the example of Burma (Myanmar) and join the singing of deserved praises for the paragon of freedom fighters Nelson Mandela, yet keep in jail hundreds of political prisoners, many on trumped-up charges and seriously ailing.

And what does this administration have to show for its human rights record? A Marcos compensation law that is awaiting all its beneficiaries to die first; a notorious rights abuser swaggering around; military officials, facing credible and serious charges of rights violations, being promoted;  a rights commission that is deafeningly silent if not conspicuously absent when needed most; a sprinkling of prohuman rights legislation that remain useless on the ground;  repressive laws and jurisprudence some dating back to the dictatorship; lack of intent to concretely expedite human rights complaints and give justice to the victims—exacerbated by the institutional weaknesses of a tedious, cumbersome, corrupt and double-standard, anti-poor justice system that not only grinds slow but grinds those who persist to seek redress; subservient arrangements for dubiously benevolent US troops mocking our sovereignty; a deceptive counterinsurgency program that wreaks havoc among civilians; the criminally inept and grossly negligent if not shameless partisan handling of killer disasters, ad nauseam.

On top of these, the Aquino administration has stuck to its guns in justifying the corrupt and patronage politics of the pork barrel system and looks the other way when legal machinations are employed in so-called land reform programs and in institutionalized labor contractualization. The basic social needs of education, housing and health continue to be compromised for greedy privatization and unbridled liberalization.

Despite its inimitable claim of being a signatory to most of the major international human rights instruments and even a drafter of the UDHR, this administration has nothing to be proud of today when it comes to human rights. Nothing at all.

But in the end, for as long as the social, economic and political conditions that breed human rights violations exist, the long arduous struggle for justice will be taken up by the victims, the persecuted and human rights defenders who will never tire striving to make a difference in the people’s lives. For ultimately, as history has time and again proven, victory will be theirs. If not today, then in the international human rights day of their own time.

—EDRE U. OLALIA,

secretary general,

National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers,

[email protected]