University of the Philippines coeds Sherlyn Cadapan and Karen Empeño have been missing for seven years now, but Cadapan’s mother says her daughter’s mobile phone still rings when she dials it, giving her hope the two may still be alive.
The military is now prohibited from issuing a hit list—officially called “order of battle”—with the enactment of a law against enforced disappearances, Malacañang said on Saturday.
It will soon be a law. Abduction by the state or by its agents is a crime. The Philippines becomes the first country in Asia to define enforced disappearance as a separate criminal offense.
While most Filipinos fondly relived the memories of their dearly departed on All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, families of desaparecidos remained in suspension, “swinging between hope and despair.”
Lawmakers and human rights watchdogs on Thursday urged President Aquino to immediately sign a bill penalizing “enforced disappearances” to allow the government to go after those behind the abductions of activist Jonas Burgos, students Karen Empeño and Sherlyn Cadapan, and other people.
As of June 2012, the Families of Victims of Involuntary Disappearance (FIND) had documented 1,838 cases of enforced disappearances since the Marcos regime. Of this number, 1,147 are still missing, 435 have surfaced alive, and 256 were found dead.
At 92, Cecilia Castelar-Lagman died on Aug. 13 without finding her son, Hermon, a labor and human rights lawyer during martial rule.
As the world observed International Day of the Disappeared on Thursday, the families of three men from the town of Al Barka in Basilan continued to wonder how the trio could have disappeared from such a well-secured place as the Ninoy Aquino International Airport’s Terminal 3 seven months ago.
The trial of retired Major General Jovito Palparan in connection with the abduction of two University of the Philippines students will begin on August 6, but the Bulacan regional trial court wants the fugitive general and another soldier to surface because they could not be tried in absentia.
A year after being charged for the disappearance of farmer-activist Jonas Burgos, three retired generals and an Army major appeared at the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Friday for the first preliminary investigation hearing of the case.
Throughout the five years that she has been searching for her “disappeared” son, Edita Burgos says she has already scaled down her expectations, from calling for justice to just wanting to find out the truth about what happened to him.
Fugitive retired Major General Jovito Palparan said Friday there was no truth to reports that he was being coddled by retired generals and members of the Armed Forces of the Philippines.
Staff Sergeant Edgardo Osorio, a co-accused of retired Major General Jovito Palparan in the abduction of two University of the Philippines students in 2006, has invoked the late President Manuel L. Quezon’s executive order that would put the soldier in the custody of the Philippine Army.
