'Morong 43' case brought to UN council

MANILA, Philippines - The Ecumenical Voice for Peace and Human Rights in the Philippines has brought the “Morong 43” incident to the United Nations Human Rights Council and urged the body to monitor the country’s compliance to obligations and pledges to human rights instruments.

Jigs Clamor, husband of one of the detained doctors and deputy secretary-general of Karapatan, spoke recently at the general debate and raised the arrest of 43 health workers in Morong, Rizal last Feb. 6.

Clamor said the health workers were held incommunicado, deprived of sleep, denied counsel, coerced, threatened, intimidated and subjected to indignities and various forms of torture.

He added evidence was planted to justify their arrest then summarily and baselessly branded as armed rebels by the military.

“False charges that are non-bailable under Philippine laws were leveled against them... and the military avoided or questioned any inquiry into their accountability to human rights violations before the Commission on Human Rights,” he said. “Legal shortcuts were resorted to and the Philippine government used a draconian Marcos-era legal rule to deprive them of their liberty.”

Clamor urged the council to look into the incident, employ appropriate measures, and urge the Philippine government to respect its pledges and commitments made during the UN’s Universal Periodic Review and its obligations to human rights instruments.

He also asked the council to urge the Philippine government to stop filing trumped up charges or “else brazen impunity shall continue.”

Clamor’s intervention was supported by the Civicus, International Association of Democratic Lawyers, Franciscans International, Lawyers Rights Watch of Canada, and the Association of American Jurists.

Rev. Rex Reyes Jr., general secretary of the National Council of Churches in the Philippines, delivered an oral intervention along similar lines.

Reyes underscored the impunity that “Oplan Bantay Laya” (Operation Plan Freedom Watch) has wrought on Filipinos.

He appealed to the council “to urge our government to stop Oplan Bantay Laya as an anti-insurgency policy (as it) makes no distinction between armed combatants and civilians.”

He added that Oplan Bantay Laya’s “continued implementation has caused massive human rights violations whose victims cut across all sectors of Philippine society.”

He also sought the body’s help in seeing to it that President-elect Benigno Aquino III stands by his campaign promise to prosecute perpetrators of human rights violations in the Philippines.

Aquino should neither engage nor adopt any policy similar to Oplan Bantay Laya in the future, Reyes said.

He hoped that the council would monitor government “pledges and commitments to international instruments and implement the recommendations that it has accepted and committed to.”

The oral intervention of Reyes was supported by the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, the World Council of Churches, Franciscans International, Lawyers Rights Watch of Canada, the Indian Council of South America, and the American Association of Jurists.

Aside from Reyes and Clamor, other members of the delegation of the Ecumenical Voice for Peace and Human Rights in the Philippines are lawyer Edre Olalia, acting secretary-general of the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers; Marie Hilao-Enriquez, chairperson of Karapatan; and Dr. Angie Gonzales of the International Coordinating Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines.

The Ecumenical Voice was in Geneva for the UN’s 14th Session of the Human Rights Council.