Among several others, the National Union of People’s Lawyers and the human rights watchdog Karapatan – which both have been red-tagged and whose members have become EJK victims – have welcomed the Supreme Court’s response, the Senate resolution and Drilon’s filing of the anti-redtagging bill.
The Calabarzon killings were actually the latest of the killings that have provoked such condemnation. Still unresolved are the killings of nine Tumandok indigenous community members in similar police operations in Panay Island last Dec. 30, the attempted slaying of the Tumandoks’ lawyer in Iloilo, as well as the killing by police anti-drug operatives of the mayor of Calbayog City.
Criticized for its muddled, bumbling response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Duterte government has been trying to rev up its two priority wars – against insurgency and against illegal drugs – in the remaining 14 months of its term.
More importantly, the AFP said its own investigation could help the military improve its own rules, regulations and policies. In backing off, such a commendable objective was dropped.
Did President Duterte blow the whistle? A week ago it was he who disclosed that many soldiers had already been inoculated with vaccine against COVID-19. Immediately there was widespread uproar: How did that happen? Who got the vaccines in? Where did they come from, and how? At least two Cabinet members, three military officers and…
President Duterte’s people need to get their act together and stop this game of putting innocent people’s lives and security at stake.
It seems that time is up for reckoning on the crude, arrogant and irresponsible red-tagging campaign, waged mainly by the military and police at the behest of the National Task Force to End the Local Communist Armed Confict or NTF-ELCAC. Created and nominally headed by President Duterte, the task force is overseen by his national…
Several times in the last four years, whenever he talked about his “war on drugs” carried out by the Philippine National Police and the thousands of killings attributed to it, President Duterte insistently denied the killings were state-sponsored, or that they had been instigated by him. Last Monday night, however, addressing the people on state…
Last week I wrote about President Duterte’s principal adviser on intelligence owning up before Congress that he had shared posts on social media from four spurious Facebook pages, without verifying the source and veracity of the information. That admission, I stressed, put into question the credibility of intelligence input in government national policy-making. Recently Facebook…
It’s a legitimate public concern to raise such a question, in light of what the designated “principal adviser to the President on intelligence” has owned up to: that he had been sharing posts on social media without verifying the source and the veracity of the information. Verifying and validating data is a basic duty of…
But over the years, Duterte has attacked human rights advocacy groups as “enemies of the state,” also church leaders, priests, pastors and nuns. He even berated the Commission on Human Rights (a constitutional body) for criticizing certain policies or pronouncements of his government. He talked (confusedly or maliciously) of “detractors pass(ing) themselves off as human rights advocates while preying on the most vulnerable humans: even using children as soldiers or human shields in [armed] encounters.”