Mrs. Arroyo must "show she means business by implementing concrete measures to prevent the deaths of more activists," Amnesty deputy director for Asia-Pacific Tim Parritt said in a statement issued in Manila yesterday.
Among other things, the President should "strengthen implementation of witness protection laws," Parritt said.
"The government has a duty to protect every person in the Philippines, no matter their political persuasion or whether or not security personnel are linked to the attacks," he said.
Parritt welcomed Mrs. Arroyo’s state of the nation address before Congress on Monday, when she categorically condemned political killings "in the harshest possible terms."
However, he said that the President must now go beyond rhetoric and show "determined action to prevent political killings."
Parritt noted that many witnesses to political killings were "simply too frightened" to come forward. Death threats and intimidation of witnesses are among the reasons that cases don’t move forward in courts, he said.
"These obstacles make it extremely difficult for victim’s families to see justice done," Parritt said.
Leftist groups who have been openly critical of Arroyo’s leadership have said that nearly 100 leftist activists have been killed by masked gunmen since the president came to power in 2001.
Five journalists have also been murdered this year compared to seven last year, making it the second most dangerous country for the press next to Iraq, according to the Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontieres.
The killings have also alarmed the Roman Catholic Church, with papal envoy Archbishop Fernando Filoni earlier this month stressing that there remains "an activity of high incidence of a moral and political violence against those who profess different political ideologies."
Meanwhile, Philippine National Police (PNP) Director General Oscar Calderon yesterday promised to strengthen ties with the National Press Club (NPC) to address the killings of journalists in the country.
Speaking before the weekly NPC forum, Calderon asked NPC president Roy Mabasa to assign two media representatives who would be part of the Task Force Usig, the special police unit assigned to solve human rights cases particularly the killings of journalists, politicians and the left-leaning opposition.
He asked the media organization to "submit two names to work with Task Force Usig because we want to have a good working relationship between the Task Force and the NPC."
The PNP said there were 81 human rights cases against journalists from 2001 to 2006. Current classification showed that out of the 81 reported cases, about 26 are work-related while the rest were due to personal disputes. Most of the cases were recorded in 2003 and 2004, an election year.
However, Calderon said with the inputs from the two media liaison, the police might revise their classification system.
They have obtained a 77 percent solution efficiency because out of the 26 cases, 20 have already been filed in court while the others are still being investigated, Calderon said. — AFP, Katherine Adraneda, Evelyn Macairan