On Thursday, December 10, 2010, will be the 62 nd anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of which the Philippines is a signatory. Sixty two years would have been long enough to establish an atmosphere where people leave in places and communities that respects and protects everybody's human rights. Sixty two years would have been more than enough to see people living in harmony and without fear of their rights being violated. After all almost all the civilized countries are signatories to this historic piece of documents. Sixty-two years after, however, violations of human rights are mounting and piling up all over the world often times we lost track counting. Wars continue to be fought up to this day. In fact there is another one looming unless things can be patched up between our neighbours – the two Koreas.
We need not go out of the Philippines to see how far we have failed in the respect of human rights. If we rely on what is reported, it would seem that the Philippines is one of the most barbaric countries in the world. But yet many groups advocating human rights (government refers to them as the cause oriented groups) say there are more cases of human rights violation that have not and are not reported. So are they saying we are better off to jump off the cliff or hang ourselves on a tree like Judas? Non-government human rights watch groups like the Karapatan would often times fault government especially its armed units like the police and the military to be the No. 1 violators of human rights. Most of the extra legal killings (ELK) and enforced disappearances (ED) have been attributed to the state actors and their para-military units. The most recent in memory that makes one puke with embarrassment was the November 23, 2009 Maguindanao massacre of 57 civilians, 33 of whom were members of the mass media.
Well that is because the State has the primary responsibility of protecting the rights of the citizens and any violation on their part is magnified one thousand times over. The atrocities and similarly barbaric killings and other forms of human rights violations of non-state violators like the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People's Army (CPP-NPA) did not get as much attention and scrutiny of the media and international groups because human rights protection is not their mandate. We have seen this kind of reports in that of UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston. Alston charged in his report that Arroyo's propaganda and counter-insurgency strategy “encourage or facilitate the extra-judicial killings of activists and other enemies” of the state and that "the AFP remains in a state of almost total denial… of its need to respond effectively and authentically to the significant number of killings which have been convincingly attributed to them." (http://en.wikipedia.org).
So never mind the fact that there are more children who are orphaned by the CPP-NPA and other rebel groups than by government armed units. Government is not short in passing laws to protect human rights. The Constitution in fact has enshrined the establishment of a Human Rights Commission. And cases have been filed in courts. In Bohol we have our share of violations of human rights particularly through ELK and the same have been attributed by Karapatan to State forces. For lack of hard facts on the contrary, these reports were regarded by the public as true. But when the Provincial Peace and Order Council (PPOC) organized its own multi-sectoral Fact Finding Committee to dig the truth in reported violent incidents and other forms of human rights violation, it was found out that most of them were not State perpetrated.
PPOC's strategy of setting up a Local Monitoring Board (LMB) for CARHRIHL (Comprehensive Agreement on the Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law) and the multi-sectoral fact finding committee, incidents of human rights violation in Bohol have substantially been reduced. The implementation of the Bohol Local Integrated Security System (BLISS), where human rights orientation of the community is a component, has also contributed to almost zero human rights violation in Bohol today. Again the best way to safeguard and protect human rights is for everyone to know what these rights are and to stand for them all the time. Last Friday Ma. Krizna S. Gomez, program coordinator of MSQRT on Extra Legal Killing and Enforced Disappearances and Ray Paolo Santiago of the Ateneo Law School were in Tagbilaran City to find out the possibility of organizing and establishing a quick response team in Bohol. They will come back on January 4 next year to finalize things. I hope they find the Quick Response Team of the PPOC and the LMB the team they want to organize.
|
