Rights groups said UN Special Rapporteur Ian Fry’s visit to the country “puts on center stage the sinister role played by the NTF-ELCAC and the dangerous impact of the terror law on the lives and safety of environmental human rights defenders in the country.”
“I call on the Philippine government to respect this right and establish a truth reconciliation process to investigate the unlawful killings by the military, hold those accountable for these killings and provide reparations for those who suffered.”
Amid all these, Karapatan said their group and the rest of the human rights community will not stop in its efforts to expose and oppose the brutal extrajudicial killings and the threats and red-tagging that increasingly target not only activists and other human rights defenders but ordinary civilians.
“They [soldiers] should be the ones protecting our youth who speak up, not the ones repressing our rights to speak out.” – Aila Joy Esperida, editor-in-chief of The Democrat.
NUPL Chairperson Edre Olalia said that while they did not achieve full legal redress, the decision “can be viewed as a loud warning shot, as it were.”
“Now that the truth is out, we demand that everyone involved in the abduction, enforced disappearance and fake surrender of Castro and Tamano be held accountable, especially NTF-ELCAC.”
What we witnessed is the bravery of two environmental defenders in the face of outright repression.
For Karapatan, this recent development is “obviously part of the NTF-ELCAC’s so-called ‘whole of nation approach’ of harnessing all available resources to surveil, profile, red-tag, marginalize, persecute and inflict other human rights violations against the poor and other critical voices, including the institutional church.”
After the SONA, the likes of Jeff Celiz, Lorraine Badoy Partosa, and NTF-ELCAC mouthpieces look like “kulang sa yakap” from Marcos. They don’t have SONA soundbites to misuse.
By DEE AYROSO
By RATZIEL SAN JUAN Altermidya MANILA — The Philippine UPR Watch, a delegation of human rights defenders and advocates participating in the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process, frowned upon the Philippine government’s response to the UPR recommendations. The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has adopted the UPR outcome of the Philippines. Out of 289…