Karapatan condemns the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) for threatening to charge Cavite-based student activist Paolo Tarra for violating the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 on baseless claims that he is recruiting the youth for the New People’s Army.
The NTF-ELCAC’s threats against Tarra is the latest harassment inflicted on the student activist. Just last May, at the instigation of the NTF-ELCAC, he was expelled from De la Salle University-Dasmariñas (DSU-D) allegedly for membership in an unrecognized campus organization. At the time, Tarra was the coordinator of the Coalition of Concerned Lasallians and had led mass actions on campus to advance the students’ democratic rights and welfare. Earlier this year, Tarra had also been harassed by the NTF-ELCAC through repeated visits to his home in Trece Martires where they showed his parents pictures of him joining protest rallies, as if this were a crime.
The NTF-ELCAC’s threats and harassment against Tarra and its frequent forays into campuses like DSU-D to redtag and vilify progressive youth and student groups are not only affronts against academic freedom but against the more basic freedoms of association and peaceful assembly. The NTF-ELCAC must not be allowed to run roughshod on these basic freedoms and further curtail what little is left of our shrinking civic space.