MANILA, Philippines — The intersections of a global pandemic and human rights might not have been immediately apparent before, but 2020 made clear how governments could wield security measures to protect public health but create an atmosphere of abuse and curtailment of civil liberties.
In the Philippines, lockdown measures have led to questionable arrests and detention of ordinary citizens for relatively simple offenses, like not wearing masks or violating curfew.
Daring to speak out about the government’s sluggish response to the coronavirus pandemic, meanwhile, carried the risk of being branded as a communist or a rebel sympathizer by state forces.
With everyone’s attention focused on the health crisis and energy worn down by the restrictions, police operations that almost always ended in the suspects’ death came under less public scrutiny, while the cyberlibel conviction of Rappler top executive Maria Ressa and the shutdown of broadcasting giant ABS-CBN left a chilling effect among journalists.
But despite many local and international watchdogs calling attention to what they considered to be the country’s shrinking democratic space, the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) recorded only 1,445 cases of human rights violations (HRVs) since January.
The number is four times lower than the yearly range of 5,000-6,000 cases, the CHR said.
Unreported cases
Most of the HRVs were complaints of police abuse in the arrest and detention of people who supposedly violated COVID-19 restrictions. But the real number is actually nebulous: unreported due to pandemic restrictions.
Even so, says Commissioner Karen Gomez-Dumpit, “the strong-armed approach [by the government] has always been there.”
“We were indeed impacted by the virus itself, but we were impacted negatively by the response to the pandemic,” she said in an interview. “We’ve seen many arrests and approaches that did not put the right to health front and center. [There] were responses to COVID-19 that were counterproductive.”
When governments need to limit certain rights in times of national emergencies, the Siracusa Principles on the Limitation and Derogation of Provisions in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights state that any measures taken must be necessary, reasonable and proportionate.
But the Duterte administration’s heavy-handed approach, Dumpit said, disenfranchised the country’s marginalized sectors more than anyone else.
For example, the total shutdown of transport from March to June greatly affected the rights of workers and those in the transport sector. Indigenous peoples were hit by the slow disbursement of financial aid. The often “ageist” lockdown measures of the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases affected senior citizens who found themselves cut off from their medical treatment.
Vulnerable sectors
Police also arrested several groups that dared to protest against these measures: the Piston 6 (June 2), the Marikina 10 (May 1) and San Roque residents (April 1), all of whom were merely seeking aid from the government.
“We don’t usually think about these things in the perspective of rights, but that’s how you gauge good governance,” Dumpit said. “We have to think about how our policies affect the rights and freedoms, especially of the vulnerable.”
Red-tagging
On the more extreme end were the ramped-up arrests of political dissidents and activists on nonbailable charges of explosives and firearms possession.
Among the 52 cases of possible illegal arrests recorded by the CHR were those of Amanda Echanis (Dec. 4), daughter of slain former National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) consultant Randall Echanis, and the Human Rights Day 7 (Dec. 10), who were all swept up in allegedly procedurally flawed police and military raids within days of each other.
In the background, the killings of both drug suspects and human rights defenders continued, spurred perhaps by President Duterte’s increasingly violent anti-Red rhetoric. These included Randall (Aug. 10), Karapatan’s Zara Alvarez (Aug. 17) and retired NDFP consultants Eugenia and Agaton Topacio (Dec. 1).
While the McCarthyite practice of Red-tagging—the labeling of critical voices as communists and state enemies to publicly vilify them—is not exactly new, Dumpit said the newly passed antiterror law and the leadership of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-Elcac) gave the practice new teeth.
In particular, Dumpit cited as example NTF-Elcac spokesperson Lt. Gen. Antonio Parlade Jr., who has “gotten away” with Red-tagging several progressives and individuals with barely a slap on the wrist from his superiors. Parlade and other task force officials face a slew of charges of grave abuse of authority before the Office of the Ombudsman and the CHR.
Some openings
“Security sector actors (like Parlade) must realize they cannot change the views of people,” Dumpit said. “They’re not there to change the opinion of people or to force the people to change their opinion of government. They are there to respond if their opinion goes out of bounds of expression.”
While the CHR and the Duterte administration have sparred on issues relating to human rights, Dumpit said 2020 also brought several fresh openings in improving the human rights situation of the country.
This included the UN Human Rights Council’s resolution for technical assistance and capacity-building to improve domestic rights measures, and the CHR’s data-sharing agreement with the Department of Justice (DOJ) on politically motivated killings.
The latter, though, has yet to bear fruit, as the DOJ had not, so far, shared any data with the commission as it promised, Dumpit said.
Right now, the DOJ bears the burden of proving to the International Criminal Court—which is close to wrapping up its preliminary examination into the Duterte administration’s war on drugs—that it is indeed prosecuting perpetrators of rights violations.
But 2020 brought no new resolutions to open cases, only additional ones.
“There’s some openings right now for engagement. But there has to be more progress than mere pronouncements,” Dumpit said. “There has to be changes on the ground, in policy.”