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.
Unauthorized vaccination probe must be completed
Tags: At Ground Level
Duterte as whistle-blower: How will vaccine probe end?
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…
Who’s fooling whom in anti-Left task force?
President Duterte’s people need to get their act together and stop this game of putting innocent people’s lives and security at stake.
Pushback slows down red-tagging spree
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…
Duterte’s new tack on drug killings: take the rap
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…
Discredited accusation repeated after 14 years
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…
Does dubious intel input guide policy-making?
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…
Actions urged to follow Duterte’s speech at UN
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.”
Closer scrutiny of human rights in the Phl
UN Special Rapporteur for extra-legal killings Agnes Callamard, speaking for several other special rapporteurs at another activity, recommended among others twin actions: for the Council to establish an on-the-ground international investigation into alleged HRVs in the Philippines, while continuing to monitor and report on the prevailing conditions; and for its member-states to “apply sanctions against Philippine government officials who [may be found] to have committed, have initiated or failed to investigate or prevent HRVs, including arbitrary killings.”
Huge anti-insurgency fund amid Covid-19, poverty rise
Of the P19.13-billion proposed budget, the biggest share, P16.4 billion from the President’s Local Government Support Fund, is to be allotted to a Barangay Development Program (BDP) administered by NTF-ELCAC.
As pandemic rages, human rights struggles press on
Amid Covid-19’s unrelenting rampage across the world, peoples are asserting and defending their rights, and fighting against the abuses, corruption and impunity of state power. The task remains as crucial, if not more so, as surviving the pandemic.