Lies, lies and more lies. It is mind-boggling how the talking heads of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) can lie through their teeth and think that those they lie to are so uninformed as to take their word hook, line and sinker.
Any person in the international community reasonably knowledgeable about conditions in the Philippines will find as simply incredible the NTF-ELCAC’s cringe-worthy claims during the recently held 77th Session of the United Nation’s Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) in Geneva, Switzerland that it has a “reinforced commitment to human rights.” In the said session, the CESR reviewed the Philippines’ compliance to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
At least two United Nations special rapporteurs who have recently visited the Philippines have seen through the NTF-ELCAC’s deception, noted the evils of red-tagging and urged the government to abolish the NTF-ELCAC. UNSR Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders Mary Lawlor has rightly stated in a report that red-tagging is a “context-specific death threat in the Philippines.”
The NTF-ELCAC’s reason for being has always been to target open, legal organizations it accuses of being “communist fronts.” It has often used perjured or coerced testimonies from “rebel returnees” in a desperate attempt to lend some measure of credibility to its red-tagging sprees. It has used the same untruths to instigate the filing of manufactured criminal cases against activists, falsely linking them to the armed rebellion, or alleging their involvement in “terrorist financing activities”.
Drunk with its own power, it has, on not a few occasions, arbitrarily targeted even unlikely organizations and personalities, like former police general and now Baguio City mayor Benjamin Magalong, actresses and models like Liza Soberano and Catriona Gray, and lately, even the Commission on Elections and its chair George Erwin Garcia.
The common denominator among these targets is not an affiliation with the Left, but their expression of views that digressed from the official government line. With the NTF-ELCAC habitually tagging as “red” anyone expressing dissent, its accusations of “communist links” have come out as baseless, frivolous and arbitrary.
Worse, as incisively recognized by no less than the Supreme Court in a landmark ruling, red-tagging which is essentially vilification, labelling, and guilt by association, constitutes threats to a person’s right to life, liberty, or security. The existence of this Supreme Court ruling makes the NTF-ELCAC’s claim that red-tagging is devoid of jurisprudential basis another of its barefaced lies.
Most activists who ended up victims of extrajudicial killing, enforced disappearance, arbitrary arrest and detention on trumped-up charges had previously been red-tagged, threatened, harassed and intimidated by State authorities led by the NTF-ELCAC.
This red-tagging agency also made much about so-called mechanisms of redress for red-tagged individuals such as the writs of amparo and habeas data, but the fact is that victims’ petitions for these protective writs have more often been denied, underscoring the difficulty faced by victims who have to contend with the State’s superior power and resources. Even in cases where they have been granted, the writs have never been foolproof guarantees of safety and security amid ever-present threats from State security forces.
If anything, the NTF-ELCAC’s show at the CESCR is proof positive of just how much of a prevaricator it has always been.