Red-tagged activists seek SC protection
STREET PROTESTS | Baguio City, an educational district, is no stranger to protest actions staged by student activists and militant groups, who voice out their thoughts on political, economic, and social issues. This protest rally was held in 2022. (File photo by EV ESPIRITU / Inquirer Northern Luzon)
BAGUIO CITY, Benguet, Philippines — Saying their lives continue to be threatened by red-tagging and other abuses allegedly committed by the government, Baguio activists have elevated their rejected plea for a writ of amparo to the Supreme Court.
At least 24 members and officials of the Baguio-based Cordillera Peoples Alliance (CPA) sought the high court’s reversal of the Oct. 24, 2022, decision of the Court of Appeal’s (CA) Former Seventeenth Division, which denied them judicial protection from the police, the military, the intelligence services, the Department of the Interior and Local Government, and the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-Elcac).
According to the CA, the activists failed to substantiate the threats allegedly posed by military surveillance operations and by barangay or municipal government resolutions declaring them persona non grata (unwelcome) in some Cordillera provinces because they were perceived as “communist rebel fronts.”
The CPA’s petition, received by the high court on June 19, urged the Supreme Court “to appreciate their evidence with fresh and compassionate eyes.”
“Repeatedly declaring CPA and its members as NPA (New People’s Army) recruiters, criminals and violators of international humanitarian law — no matter how false the accusations are — creates in the public’s mind [the notion] that activists are enemies of society if only because they dare openly air criticisms against government abuses and social inequities,” the petition said.
The activists also asked the Supreme Court to disqualify the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) from representing the NTF-Elcac.
‘Wrong signal’
“To allow the OSG, the law office of the government, to represent respondents who are alleged to have participated in the commission of human rights violations, sends the wrong signal that the government is shielding those alleged perpetrators,” according to the petition filed by the activists’ lawyers, led by Francisca Macliing Claver.
The writ of amparo is described by Supreme Court rules as “a remedy available to any person whose right to life, liberty and security is violated or threatened with violation by an unlawful act or omission of a public official or employee, or of a private individual or entity.”
In its 2022 ruling and the April 11 dismissal of the CPA’s motion for reconsideration, the CA said the allegations failed to specify “the names and personal circumstances of the purported members of the AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines) and the PNP (Philippine National Police) who visited their houses, approached them, or [surveilled] them.”
Online harassment
The activists were also plagued by Red-tagging attacks online, particularly in 2020 and 2021, but the OSG argued that no law makes Red-tagging a crime.
According to the petitioners, the CA committed procedural errors in handling their writ petition. They asked the Supreme Court to direct government and security agencies to cease “acts of initiating social media posts and other forms of publication directed at branding and declaring the [CPA], their affiliate organizations and the petitioners as communist-terrorists, NPA front organizations, NPA recruiters and others of similar content.”
The petitioners also asked that online harassment and Red-tagging be investigated and people behind these prosecuted for violating cyberlibel laws, and for the high court to nullify and investigate the persona non grata resolutions.
The 111-page petition recalled instances when the 24 activists were publicly harassed, put under surveillance, or charged with crimes that were eventually dismissed by local courts.
CPA chair Windel Bolinget, one of the petitioners, sued the Cordillera and Davao del Norte police offices on June 23 for a “trumped-up” murder charge against him that was dismissed by a Davao del Norte court in 2021.
“Despite countless claims by the respondent state forces that the petitioners are insurgents, not one of the petitioners has been convicted of rebellion,” the petitioners asserted.
