Media Releases

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.

The dismissal of the charges against Aetas Japer Gurung and Junior Ramos “clearly show how the Anti-Terrorism Act is being used to fabricate charges against individuals and arbitrarily tag them as ‘terrorists,’” human rights alliance Karapatan said on Monday, as it slammed the statement of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) on the said dismissal.

More than a week before Pres. Rodrigo Duterte’s last State of the Nation Address, rights group Karapatan called to stop the killings anew in a protest action at the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) office in Quezon City, and said that the president’s last SONA is a “day of reckoning” for victims of extrajudicial killings in the Philippines.

On July 9, 2021, the legal counsel of detained peasant organizer Ernesto Jude Rimando filed a motion for urgent medical confinement at the Quezon City Regional Trial Court Branch 80, asking the court to allow him to be treated at the Philippine General Hospital and for him to stay there until medically discharged by attending doctor and the hospital.

Karapatan notes the recent resolution of the Supreme Court on rules on the use of body-worn cameras in the execution of warrants as a product of relentless and persistent justice-seeking efforts of victims of human rights violations, lawyers, activists, and other civil libertarians, while we lament that such action came after numerous cases of killings, arbitrary arrests and detention and other rights violations in the government’s war on drugs and counterinsurgency campaigns.

“[We should] defend [our rights], or else we are bound to lose them.”

This was one of Jose Jaime “Nonoy” Espina’s messages that manifested his determination in fighting for people’s rights and civil liberties. In the midst of the calls to reject the government’s “terror law” last year, he was asked this question: “What does freedom mean to you?”