Human Rights Watchdog Reports Abuses 
Under Macapagal-Arroyo 
Bush’s ‘war on terror’ has made the world more dangerous

The London-based human rights watchdog, Amnesty International (AI), has confirmed serious human rights abuses committed under the administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. U.S. President George W. Bush’s “war on terror” has made the world more dangerous by curbing human rights, undermining international law and shielding governments from scrutiny and has given governments a license to abuse human rights in the name of state security, it also said.

By Bulatlat.com

The London-based human rights watchdog, Amnesty International (AI), has revealed serious human rights abuses committed under the administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

In its 2002 report which was released only late last week, AI also cited harassment, killings or disappearances of activists, journalists and opposition politicians as well as torture and ill-treatment of both rebel and criminal suspects since 2001.

As it issued its annual report on the Philippines, the international human rights watchdog also noted that U.S. President George W. Bush’s “war on terror” has made the world more dangerous by curbing human rights, undermining international law and shielding governments from scrutiny.

AI said that Washington’s “war on terror” failed to make the world safer and has given governments a license to abuse human rights in the name of state security.

“What would have been unacceptable on Sept. 11, 2001 is now becoming almost the norm,” AI Secretary-General Irene Khan told a news conference in London May 28, accusing the Bush administration of adopting “a new doctrine of human rights a la carte.”

On the Philippines, although AI reported “unlawful killings” by both government and opposition armed groups, it said that despite an extensive range of institutional and procedural safeguards, complaint mechanisms and legal sanctions, “suspected perpetrators of serious human rights violations were rarely brought to justice and a climate of impunity persisted.”

Complaint procedures for victims failed to provide effective remedies, AI said, adding that public confidence remained low in the state bodies, Commission on Human Rights and the Ombudsman.

Low figure

AI reported the killing of at least 28 members of anti-government forces since early 2001, a figure which is low compared to the actual number of killings, massacres and other extra-judicial executions recorded by human rights groups in the Philippines.

But it singled out the killing of human rights activist and campus journalist Benjaline Hernandez, 22, and three companions in Mindanao April last year. “Local residents who saw the bodies said that Hernandez’s skull had been crushed and that her face was badly disfigured by bullet wounds,” Amnesty said.

The four were summarily executed by military and paramilitary men, it was reported in the Philippines.

AI representatives conducted investigations in the Philippines twice last year.

Noting the end of the invasion of Iraq, AI’s Irene Khan warned of a “very real risk that Iraq will go the way of Afghanistan if no genuine effort is made to heed the call of the Iraqi people for law and order and full respect of human rights.”

Khan also accused the U.S. government of continuing “to pick and choose which bits of its obligation under international law it will use, and when it will use them,” highlighting the detention without charge or trial of hundreds of prisoners in Afghanistan and in a U.S. military camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

AI also viewed with concern the arrest of 1,200 foreign nationals – most of them Muslim men of Arab or South Asian origin – during investigations into the 9/11 attacks. By end-2002, most detainees arrested had been reported or released or were charged with crimes which were unrelated to 9/11 or to “terrorism,” it said. Bulatlat.com

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