Int’l Human Rights Day countdown: Tuwid na daan, wakasan
TODAY is the International Day of Solidarity with Political Prisoners. Declared by the International League of People’s Struggles, it is being observed by people’s organizations here and abroad to mobilize support for justice and freedom for political prisoners all over the world.
Int’l Human Rights Day countdown: Tuwid na daan, wakasan
TODAY is the International Day of Solidarity with Political Prisoners. Declared by the International League of People’s Struggles, it is being observed by people’s organizations here and abroad to mobilize support for justice and freedom for political prisoners all over the world.
At present, there are 561 political prisoners in the Philippines, 304 of whom have been arrested during Noynoy Aquino’s brutal watch.
If any political prisoner was freed during his term, it is not because of Aquino’s policy to observe human rights – because there is none; it is because of the people’s movement to fight it out in the courts, in spite of the odds, leading to the dismissal of cases for lack of evidence. It also proves what human rights organizations have been saying all along – that this administration persists in arresting and filing trumped-up charges against those it perceives as enemies of the state.
Six months from now, the Aquino government shall end, yet it continues to criminalize just and militant political deeds. It maintains that revolutionaries are plain criminals who deserve neither justice nor humane treatment. On the other hand, it provides preferential treatment to the likes of “The Butcher” Maj. Gen. Jovito Palparan and killer Corporal Joseph Scott Pemberton. Palparan lives it up in his VIP detention quarters in Fort Bonifacio when he should be detained in a regular prison. Pemberton was whisked away to the JUSMAG facility in Camp Aguinaldo when he should have been driven straight to the New Bilibid Prisons after conviction. A special detention center shall be built for him in the camp to further lighten his load.
This is how human rights are trampled upon in Aquino’s tuwid na daan.
Exactly a week before International Human Rights Day, and the Aquino government has only further unmasked itself as a coddler of torturers, rapists, and killers, even as it hurls Philippine sovereignty down the drain.