Rights Report Philippines

MANILA — On Thursday, a group of men identifying themselves as former Marines — some of whom the Navy confirmed never served at all — were given a sworn platform before television cameras in the Philippine Senate to accuse a prize-winning priest who buries drug war victims, a lawmaker who spent nearly seven years in prison for opposing extrajudicial killings, and former left-wing legislators who championed the rights of the poor of receiving cash kickbacks from flood control projects.

ONE  month before Ferdinand Marcos Jr. won the Philippine presidency in 2022, a London political communications firm sent him a confidential proposal. The fee was $144,000 a month. The job, according to a document obtained by the investigative outlet Whale Hunting, was to manage the international narrative around a candidate whose family name carried the weight of one of the most documented cases of state plunder in modern history.

Majority of the 27 Cernet workers and their supporters on May 8. (Photo from the Facebook page of Cernet) A Philippine court has dismissed terrorism financing charges against 27 current and former members of a Visayas-based humanitarian network, ruling that the acts they were accused of committing were not a crime under any law in effect at the time.

Photo by JAN REVO TRIBACO / Rights Report Philippines BEFORE dawn on April 19, residents of Sitio Sinugmawan in Barangay Salamanca in Toboso town, Negros Occidental, were awakened by sudden bursts of gunfire. When the shooting stopped, residents said several soldiers stormed their houses and searched for fleeing communist guerrillas.

SOLIMAN M. Santos Jr. spent years of his life drafting the Philippine law against crimes against humanity. Between 2002 and 2006, he prepared three versions of what became Republic Act 9851, the country’s most powerful domestic statute against crimes against humanity. He worked with the Philippine Red Cross to push it through Congress, and watched the International Committee of the Red Cross lobby the executive and the military to finally let it pass.

“The world recognizes in Frenchie Mae a journalist imprisoned for doing her job — and in that recognition lies the most damning vindication of her work and cause as a people’s journalist.” – National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers ON THE  morning of February 7, 2020, Frenchie Mae Cumpio was dragged from her bedroom and made to lie on a kitchen floor while police and soldiers moved through the house. “All we saw were boots,” she would latertestify in court. She has not been free since.

ON THE morning of May 11, two things happened simultaneously in Manila, and only one of them was about Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s agenda. The first: agents of the National Bureau of Investigation arrived at the Senate to serve an ICC arrest warrant against Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa — former police chief, chief enforcer of Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war, now wanted for crimes against humanity.

Senator Loren Legarda is shown here with officials from Parliamentarians for Global Action (PGA) with whom she deposited the instrument of ratification of the Rome Statute. The Philippines thus became the 117th State Party to the statute that created the International Criminal Court. (Photo from PGA website) ON Aug.

Randy Toto, a resident of Plarending, near the fishpond where the bodies of the fatalities were recovered. (Photo by Jan Revo Tribaco/Rights Report Philippines ) TOBOSO, NEGROS OCCIDENTAL — The Commission on Human Rights (CHR) has subpoenaed  documents and reports from the military pertaining to the clash between the Philippine Army and New People’s Army (NPA) guerrillas that led to the deaths of 19 people, including nine civilians, on April 19 in this town.

THERE is a quote, worn smooth from overuse but no less true for it, that the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice. Martin Luther King Jr. borrowed it from a 19th-century abolitionist preacher. He believed it. He died before he could see it proven right. The Philippines is living that arc right now — and the bending, when it comes, is rarely graceful. Rodrigo Duterte stood before crowds and told them killing was the answer. He called it governance. Love of country, he said.