Expectedly, the Philippine government’s inking of the joint human rights program with the United Nations is now being spun as “sincere efforts” on human rights.

The people's right to peaceably assemble and protest is a basic human right guaranteed by our Constitution: no law or policy can abridge or prohibit it — and this right remains in effect even amid the pandemic. In fact, it is President Rodrigo Duterte’s criminal negligence of people’s welfare and his fascist attacks that are forcing the people to not only exercise but assert the right to protest, including for his last State of the Nation Address.

Lumad activists Julieta Gomez and Niezel Velasco, who were arrested in Quezon City last Friday, July 16, are not communist rebels but leaders of indigenous and humanitarian organizations, human rights alliance Karapatan asserted today, as the group assailed the arrest of the Gomez and Velasco as a “brazen attempt to hinder them from conducting their advocacy work and to vilify their work by arresting them based on planted evidence and trumped-up charges.”

This input was delivered by Karapatan Secretary General Cristina Palabay in the webinar “No Justice, No Peace: 5 Years of State Terror Under Duterte” earlier today, July 21, 2021. You can watch the webinar on Facebook through this link.

At this point, President Rodrigo Duterte’s agenda in his bid to run for vice president in the upcoming national elections is undeniably clear: he wants immunity as a shameless ploy for impunity. President Duterte knows that cases for his bloody crimes against the Filipino people are waiting for him once his term ends. He knows he cannot escape any of them, including the cases against him before the International Criminal Court.