KARAPATAN assailed the dismissal by the Ombudsman of the criminal and administrative complaints filed by abduction survivors Jonila Castro and Jhed Tamano against government and military officials responsible for their kidnapping and illegal detention and who staged a press conference where the two were to be presented to the media as “surrenderers.”
The charges filed in 2024 by Jhed and Jonila ranged from arbitrary detention and grave coercion to violations of the Anti-Torture Law. It was also to be the first case filed under the Anti-Enforced Disappearance Act.
Jhed and Jonila, who were looking into the destructive effects of reclamation projects on coastal communities in Central Luzon, were abducted in Orion, Bataan in September 2023, detained and tortured for 17 days before being surfaced as surrenderers in a press conference organized by the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC). Here, they courageously went off-script, denounced their captors and said that they had indeed been abducted. A retaliatory case of slander filed against them by the military was eventually dismissed.
Seething at the dismissal, KARAPATAN secretary general Cristina Palabay said, “Not a single hearing was ever held for close to two years, and not a single word was heard from the Ombudsman in all this time prior to the dismissal.”
“This only reinforces our belief that the military and police persist in perpetrating rights abuses because of the thick veil of impunity that shields them,” added Palabay. “Such protection encourages perpetrators to continue making a mockery of existing laws and trample on human rights.”
According to Global Witness, the Philippines remains the deadliest country in Asia for environmental defenders. The Philippine government was taken to task for resorting to red-tagging and the weaponization of anti-terror legislation to persecute environmental activists and other dissenters.
“KARAPATAN joins other sectors in condemning the dismissal of the cases filed by Jhed and Jonila. This dismissal as well as the ongoing persecution of other environmental defenders in Kasibu, Nueva Vizcaya and Mankayan, Benguet show that the Marcos Jr. regime is hell-bent on selling out the Philippines’ land and mineral wealth to foreign interests, to the detriment of the people’s interests. We cannot allow this to go on,” stressed Palabay. “KARAPATAN expresses solidarity with environmental defenders in holding their ground against mining and other environmentally destructive projects that this callous regime is pushing.”