URGENT APPEAL FOR ACTION ON THE ARBITRARY AND BASELESS DESIGNATION OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES RIGHTS ACTIVISTS AS TERRORIST INDIVIDUALS
July 21, 2023
Dear friends and colleagues,
Greetings of peace!
On December 9, 2020, the Anti-Terrorism Council signed ATC Resolution No. 12 (2020) designating the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army as terrorist organizations, after former President Rodrigo Duterte signed Republic Act No. 11479 or the Anti-Terrorism Act.
Two years after, on December 7, 2022, the Anti-Terrorism Council (ATC) signed Resolution No. 35 (2022) designating indigenous peoples’ rights defender Ma. Natividad “Doc Naty” Castro, former National Council member of Karapatan and a community-based health worker, as a “terrorist individual.” The Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) signed AMLC Resolution No. TF-63, on January 25, 2023, freezing Dr. Castro’s property and funds, including related accounts.
Recently, on June 7, 2023, the ATC signed Resolution No. 41 (2023) designating six persons including five indigenous peoples’ leaders and advocates — Sarah Abellon Alikes, Jennifer R. Awingan, Windel Bolinget, Stephen Tauli, and May Casilao — as terrorist individuals. The AMLC signed on June 30, 2023 Resolution No. TF-63, freezing their property and funds, including related accounts.
These persons designated by the ATC as “terrorist individuals” have one thing in common: they have dedicated the greater part of their lives to defending and advancing the rights and welfare of the oppressed and the downtrodden.
The four indigenous peoples’ human rights defenders – Alikes, Awingan, Bolinget and Tauli— are leaders of the Cordillera People’s Alliance (CPA), which was established in 1984 at the height of the struggle against Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s martial law. Activists and people’s organizations who were at the forefront of the fight to oppose the Chico Dams project and the operations of the Cellophil Resources Corporation organized the alliance. The CPA has since become one of the best-organized indigenous bodies in the world.
A native of Sagada and Bontoc, Mountain Province, Windel Bolinget is the chairperson of the CPA. He was among the over 600 individuals the Department of Justice (DOJ) accused in its 2019 proscription petition as alleged members of the CPP. The DOJ later amended its petition and delisted almost all names, including that of Bolinget’s, after receiving wide criticism and opposition.
Bolinget, one of the petitioners at the Supreme Court who questioned the constitutionality of the terror law, is also a victim of trumped-up charges twice. He was first accused of involvement in the 2018 killing of a tribal chief in Mindanao, and later charged with rebellion in connection with an NPA ambush in Abra in 2022 – both cases have been dismissed.
Bolinget and his family have had to endure a series of threats, harassment and intimidation, including a shoot to kill order against him. His terrorist designation was announced shortly after Bolinget filed a damage suit against those responsible for fabricating the Mindanao murder charges against him as well as the Cordillera police chief who issued the shoot to kill order against him.
Jennifer Awingan is a former student leader and currently a research staff of the CPA. She was arrested in January 2023 for a trumped-up case of rebellion in connection with a New People’s Army ambush in Malibcong, Abra in October 2022. Also named in the warrant were Cordillera and Ilocos-based activists, including Bolinget, development workers, and a community journalist. The rebellion charges were quashed by the court last May for lack of probable cause.
Awingan is also one of the founding members and served as the coordinator of the Asia-Pacific Indigenous Youth Network, now Asia Young Indigenous Peoples’ Network. She is the mother of Kilusang Mayo Uno’s Kara Taggaoa, who also faces allegations of direct assault and robbery filed by the police before a Quezon City court and is currently out on bail. Jennifer’s husband, Ronald, is president of the Union of Faculty and Employees of Saint Louis University. As a result of Jennifer’s designation, Ronald’s bank account has been frozen as well. Last year, Awingan sought the assistance of the Commission on Human Rights-Cordillera following a series of harassment by men who introduced themselves as military personnel.
Sarah Abellon-Alikes is a member of the Regional Development Center – Kattinulong Dagiti Umili ti Amianan (RDC-Kaduami), which delivers development services to marginalized communities in Northern Luzon, and is also a pioneer of the CPA. She has dedicated most of her life to organizing indigenous communities for the protection of their ancestral lands and the environment against destructive projects, such as large-scale mines and dams.
A peace advocate whose father was the late Bishop Richard Abellon, Sr. of the Episcopal Church of the Philippines, she has been actively campaigning against continued human rights violations, the intense militarization of Cordillera communities, and political repression.
Prior to her acquittal in the Abra rebellion case, where she was one of Bolinget’s co-accused, she had hurdled several other trumped-up cases filed by the military against her and other development workers in Ilocos Sur in 2017, including homicide, frustrated homicide, frustrated murder, arson and robbery.
Stephen Tauli, a veteran of the anti-Chico Dam Projects struggle, is currently a member of the CPA regional council. He is an organizer affiliated with the Timpuyog ti Mannalon ti Kalinga, a peasant organization in the province, and is active in the ongoing opposition against the 49 MW Saltan D and 45 MW Saltan E Dams along the Saltan River in Kalinga, which are projects of JBD Water Power Inc. The dam projects will adversely affect the ancestral lands of up to six tribes in the province.
Tauli, like other leaders of the CPA, has been a constant subject of surveillance, red-tagging and harassment. Suspected state agents abducted him in August 2022 near the CPA provincial office in Tabuk City, Kalinga. His captors released him more than 24 hours after his reported abduction, but not before he was shunted from one detention place to another, interrogated about certain CPP-NPA personalities and coerced into signing a document stating his alleged position in the CPP-NPA. He was also one of Bolinget, Awingan and Abellon-Alikes’ co-accused in the Abra rebellion case that was dismissed by the court in May of this year.
Two of the wrongfully designated individuals are human rights defenders from Mindanao.
May Casilao was an active member of Tunay na Alyansa ng Bayan Alay sa Katutubo (TABAK), a Manila-based organization established in 1985 advocating for the national minorities’ rights to ancestral lands and self-determination.
Since 2004, she has been active in Panalipdan! Mindanao (Defend Mindanao), a Mindanao-wide interfaith network of various sectoral organizations and individuals focused on providing education on, and conducting campaigns against, threats to the environment and people of the island, especially the Lumad. In 2014, Panalipdan! Mindanao, in cooperation with InPeace Mindanao and Rural Missionaries of the Philippines published Undermining patrimony: The large-scale mining plunder in Mindanao and the people’s continuing struggle and resistance.
May is the wife of NDFP consultant Eric Casilao who was arrested on April 1, 2023 and is currently detained in Davao City.
Dr. Natividad Castro, or “Doc Naty,” a graduate of the University of the Philippines College of Medicine, is a renowned community health worker who has been serving the most impoverished peasant and indigenous communities of the Caraga region for close to 30 years. She was a National Council member of Karapatan, who documented human rights violations in Caraga and assisted HRV victims.
In 2021, Doc Naty’s name, along with those of other human rights defenders in Caraga, appeared in a poster distributed throughout the region identifying them as members of the NPA. In February 2022, she was arrested at her family home in San Juan City. She was among 500 persons named in a warrant for the alleged kidnapping and serious illegal detention of a member of a paramilitary group. She was freed after a month, after the court ruled that her right to due process was violated during her arrest, but was later ordered rearrested after the court granted a motion for reconsideration filed by the Department of Justice questioning her release.
The recent arbitrary and baseless designation of these IP human rights defenders brings to fore crucial issues raised by Karapatan and other human rights organizations against Republic Act No. 11479 or the Anti-Terrorism Act, particularly on the weaponization of the said draconian law against political dissent and human rights work and advocacy in the Philippines and the dire implications on the rights to due process and against warrantless arrests, among others.
The subjects of designation are known human rights defenders, with records of years of activism and public service to their names. They have endured threats, harassment, red-tagging, and even arbitrary arrests, detention, abduction and torture. With these designations, their lives and security are put in more grave danger.
In these cases, the vague and overbroad definition of “acts of terrorism” is in full view. The exercise of the defenders’ rights to freedom of association, to free expression, to organize and to political dissent are deliberately being curtailed and tagged as terrorist acts.
The defenders were blatantly denied due process as they did not receive any information or summons from the Anti-Terrorism Council to answer the accusations against them. Even under the ATA and its implementing rules and regulations, there appears to be no immediate and substantial remedy for them to be delisted.
In the ATC’s press statements, it cited so-called “verified and validated information, sworn statements, and other pieces of evidence gathered by Philippine law enforcement agencies” as the sole bases of designation – assertions which no one but the ATC has knowledge of, and are highly questionable and lacking in credibility.
The arbitrary powers of the ATC in designating groups and individuals, without the benefit of any public process nor judicial proceeding, is one of the most questionable provisions in the ATA. Members of the ATC present their so-called evidence which they supposedly gathered (or concocted) among themselves, and they decide who to designate, without the participation of those accused and without oversight from an independent court or body.
These, and more, are the fundamental issues against the anti-terror law.
We call on all our allies, especially community health workers, indigenous peoples rights defenders, environmental activists and all freedom-loving peoples here and abroad to support Windel Bolinget, Jennifer Awingan, Sarah Alikes, Stephen Tauli, May Casilao and Dr. Natividad Castro, and stand with them against the intensified harassment and persecution of human rights defenders who are fighting injustice, inequality and impunity and the weaponization of the law in the Philippines.
We urgently appeal for your support and solidarity by:
1. Writing letters and statements supporting the human rights defenders arbitrarily designated and to send the letters and statements to the following:
Mr. Ferdinand R. Marcos, Jr., President of the Republic of the Philippines
Email: op@president.gov.ph/pcc@malacanang.gov.ph or send a message through http://president.gov.ph/contact-us/
Mr. Lucas Bersamin, Anti-Terrorism Council Chairperson and Executive Secretary
Email: op@president.gov.ph/pcc@malacanang.gov.ph or send a message through http://president.gov.ph/contact-us/
Mr. Eduardo Año
Anti-Terrorism Council Vice Chairperson and National Security Adviser
Email: publicaffairs@nsc.gov.ph
Mr. Matthew David
Member, Anti-Terrorism Council, and Executive Director of the Anti-Money Laundering Council
Email: secretariat@amlc.gov.ph
Atty. Richard Palpal-latoc
Chairperson, Commission on Human Rights of the Philippines
Email: ocrpp@chr.gov.ph
2. Issuing statements of solidarity for the human rights defenders to be circulated to the public and media circles, and calling on the Philippine government to invalidate their wrongful designation as terrorist individuals and to repeal Republic Act 11479, (An Act to Prevent, Prohibit and Penalize Terrorism), otherwise known as the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 which is weaponized and brandished to suppress dissent, persecute and curtail the movements and activities of human rights defenders and other political activists.
3. Publish these in your websites, social media platforms, among others, using the following calls:
Revoke the wrongful terrorist designation of human rights defenders!
Junk the anti-terror law!
Please send us a copy of your email to the above-named officials, to our address below:
Karapatan Alliance Philippines
2/F Erythrina Bldg., #1 Maaralin cor Matatag Sts.
Brgy. Central, Diliman, Quezon City 1100 PHILIPPINES
Telefax: (+632) 435 4146
Email: publicinfo@karapatan.org
Website: www.karapatan.org