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Human rights watchdog Karapatan reasserted its call for an independent investigation of international human rights bodies into the Duterte administration’s “worsening human rights violations and deplorable crimes against humanity” as it assailed the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) creation of a so-called inter-agency panel to investigate the thousands of deaths in the government’s sham drug war.

With the looming enactment of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020, human rights watchdog Karapatan warned that “as President Rodrigo Duterte enters his twilight years in power, he and his militarist lapdogs are now gearing up to unleash in full the horrors of State repression in a desperate effort to consolidate power and secure his fascist dictatorship in the face of growing mass resistance.” The group decried Duterte’s four years in power as “a worsening epidemic of State terrorism, blatant injustice, and gross human rights violations.”

Human rights watchdog Karapatan sounded alarm over the “increasingly worsening attacks on human rights activists and environmental defenders” amid the looming passage of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 as the rights group decried the military’s red-tagging of Josephine Parra-Porquia, wife of slain human rights activist Jose Reynaldo “Jory” Porquia, as well as the arrest of seven anti-mining Lumad leaders in Misamis Oriental.

Rights group Karapatan today welcomed the statement of thirty-one (31) Special Procedures of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UN HRC) released on Friday, June 26, 2020, calling on the UN HRC to “establish an on-the-ground international investigation into the human rights situation in the Philippines” and “to initiate, whenever possible, governmental sanctions and criminal prosecution against individual Philippine officials who have committed, incited or failed to prevent human rights abuses.”

As the world marked the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture yesterday, June 26, human rights watchdog Karapatan warned that the passage of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 will “alarmingly enable and worsen the use of torture and other brutal forms of state violence in the government's counterinsurgency and counterterror campaigns.”