President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. answers questions from the media on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit in Bangkok, Thailand on Saturday, Nov. 19, 2022. (Photo by DANIZA FERNANDEZ / INQUIRER.net)
BRUSSELS — President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. on Sunday night said he would raise the issue of human rights abuses in the Philippines during a three-day summit here after the European Union’s (EU) repeated threat to revoke trade perks for the Philippines.
Speaking to reporters onboard PR001 en route to Belgium, the President said the human rights issues in the Philippines should not be “related” to negotiations of trade perks with the EU. “We’ll bring it up with the EU.
I don’t think one thing should be related to the other but we’ll see. We’ll see. Yeah. We’ll see,” he said. The President and his delegation will hold meetings with concerned officials of the European Commission, the European Council and the European Parliament to tackle the country’s EU Generalized Scheme of Preferences Plus (GSP) privileges.
The GSP+ granted the Philippines in 2014 a privilege that allowed the duty-free entry of more than 6,000 exports from Manila to the EU, but the country should comply with its obligations under 27 international conventions on human rights, labor, environment and climate action, and good governance.
In September 2020, the European Parliament expressed “deep concern over the rapidly deteriorating human rights situation in the Philippines” under then-President Rodrigo Duterte.
Duterte’s bloody war on drugs, which had claimed more than 6,000 mostly poor Filipinos, had drawn global condemnation due to alleged human rights violations by law enforcers. In February this year, the EU Parliament adopted a resolution warning about the withdrawal of the Philippines’ trade privileges with the EU due to the country’s human rights situation.
The Parliament urged the European Commission “to set clear, public, time-bound benchmarks for the Philippines to comply with its human rights obligations” under the GSP+.
The Philippines will need to reapply in 2023 to avail of trade perks under the GSP+.
As of 2019, government data showed that foreign direct investments in the Philippines from the European Union reached 14.4 billion euros (P838.7 billion), making the EU the largest single foreign investor in the country.