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The murder of 27-year-old Vincent Adia at the Rizal Provincial Hospital’s Angono Annex is “a most vivid illustration of the level of impunity in the Philippines,” human rights watchdog Karapatan said, as the group condemned “what can only be described as a gruesome and horrendous attack emblematic of the rapidly deteriorating human rights crisis in the country.”

The appointment of Mañanita cop Major General Debold Sinas as the new Philippine National Police chief does not come as a surprise for us: President Rodrigo Duterte has a clear penchant for rewarding the most notorious of human rights violators among his minions with rank promotions as well as higher budgets for their agencies.

As the leaders of Karapatan, Gabriela, and the Rural Missionaries of the Philippines (RMP) face arraignment proceedings today, November 9, on the perjury charges filed by National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon Jr., Karapatan Secretary General Cristina Palabay, one of the respondents in the case, asserted that the charges were “unmistakably and clearly a form of reprisal ironically based on poorly-concocted lies meant to discredit our human rights work.”

Human rights alliance Karapatan expressed its condemnation and disappointment at the Senate Committee on National Defense and Security led by Senator Panfilo Lacson Sr., the principal author of the Anti-Terrorism Act in the Senate, whose hearing is turning out to be the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict’s (NTF-ELCAC) “roadshow for its deranged red-tagging spree and a dry-run of a meeting of the Anti-Terrorism Council’s arbitrary terror-tagging of individuals and people’s organizations — setting them all up for graver violat

With “war criminal” National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon Jr. at the helm of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) as the task force’s vice chairman, human rights watchdog Karapatan scored Esperon for “recycling the same garbage of deadly McCarthyite lies and horrors he unleashed more than a decade ago under the dark days of Oplan Bantay Laya.”