“National government officials must act now or step down from their positions. No compromises.”
Students strike to demand proper aid for typhoon victims, hold the Duterte administration accountable for negligence
Tags: President Duterte
At cross-purposes with itself
It explains why it is abridging the people’s right to information: it is to prevent the citizenry from demanding that government truly address the roots of poverty by, among other means, curbing the dishonesty in public office that contributes to the hopelessness, hunger and despair that has led many Filipinos to take up the gun. His own regime is in that sense at cross-purposes with Mr. Duterte’s oft repeated promise to end corruption.
Call for justice for the disappeared continues
The group continues to demand justice for all victims of enforced disappearance and to hold into account the perpetrators. There are more than 1,000 who disappeared from Marcos dictatorship until the present administration, according to Desaparecidos.
Unreason as norm
Both reactions provoke further criticism and even outrage not only from ordinary citizens but even from their fellow officials themselves. No one can blame those who, as a result, end up concluding that regime bureaucrats focus on non-essentials because the administration they’re serving can’t even articulate its own policies and actions.
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…
A cruel irony
Could Senator Leila de Lima be right? Was President Rodrigo Duterte’s speech as “plastic and (as) fake as the dolomite beach”? Did he not really mean what he said? Senator De Lima was primarily alluding to Mr. Duterte’s pre-recorded speech before the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), which she compared to the P389.8-million “white sand”…
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…
Rights groups to exhaust other venues to hold Duterte accountable
“There are ways forward. But certainly, the international community has a role in attaining justice, especially [since] the domestic mechanisms are severely compromised,”
Farmer in Kabankalan City beheaded, rights groups alarmed at increasing abuse cases in Negros
Guillen’s brother said that the victim went missing when he returned to his house after they have been advised by the military to evacuate the place because of an encounter between government forces and the New People’s Army. Reports say that his decomposing decapitated body was found at the base of a ravine near the encounter site in barangay Tan-awan.
Abetting the information crisis
The Duterte regime’s denying the public access to government information prevents the populace’s meaningful involvement in the politics and governance of this country as the essential condition to bringing about the social, economic and political changes needed to bring it to the 21st century — changes Mr. Duterte was promising during his 2016 campaign for the Presidency, and in anticipation of which he was elected by 33% of the electorate