Panel Condemns Duterte’s “War on Human Rights”

Angelo Karlo Guillen, Czarina Golda Musni, and Melai Pinlac — three human rights lawyers from the Philippines — presented on President Rodrigo Duterte’s attack on the legal profession and human rights. The February 15 event was sponsored by the Schell Center for International Human Rights, the Philippines National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers (NUPL), and Malaya Movement, and was moderated by Ram Dolom ’23.

“The human rights situation in the Philippines is dire,” Pinlac said, adding that most attacks have happened in the north of the Philippines. Counterinsurgency and antiterrorism programs, the government’s war on drugs, and extrajudicial killings and other human rights violations have contributed to the current crisis, according to Pinlac.

Guillen, the Secretary-General of NUPL–Panay, explained that NUPL works primarily with community-based organizations as they address the crisis.

“We go to rural communities ... including areas where Indigenous peoples live and document incidents of human rights violations and give legal advice and assistance,” Guillen explained. “We also discuss possible representation.”

Guillen also explained NUPL’s role in documenting and seeking redress for those human rights violations.

Through NUPL’s documentation efforts, Pinlac, the Assistant Secretary General for the Protection and Welfare of Lawyers and Judges of the NUPL, could provide alarming statistics on attacks against human rights actors across the country. Since July 2016, she noted, there have been 168 incidents of apparently profession- or work-related attacks. These attacks, occurring over less than six years, account for 44% of all assumed profession or work-related attacks since 1984.  The number of lawyers killed since 2016 is almost 50% of the total since 1984. Among the NUPL’s recommendations to the government, Pinlac said, is a call for adherence to and public awareness on the U.N. Basic Principles on the role of lawyers.

Human rights workers, according to Guillen, are also targeted in the crackdown. “In our region alone, we've lost a lawyer Ben Ramos and a paralegal Zara Alvarez,” he said. “Both of them were assassinated ... They were human rights advocates who worked with us in the field,” he lamented.

“In March of last year ... I survived an attempt on my life,” Guillen continued. “That evening as I was returning from work, two men intercepted me and chased me down. They had two other accomplices on board motorcycles which they later used as getaway vehicles. The assailants chased me down and stabbed me repeatedly in the head, the neck, and the shoulder, and the weapon that they used was a screwdriver.”

In the days leading up to this attack, he explained, police assassinated a potential witness in a NUPL case. The case investigated police involvement in a massacre of nine members of an Indigenous community.

“I count myself among the fortunate ones who survived these attacks,” Guillen said. “But in the months that followed two other senior NUPL lawyers were assassinated. To this day none of the perpetrators of these attacks against our ranks have been brought to justice.”

In addition to individual attacks, Guillen added, “human rights lawyers in the Philippines also have to contend with systemic problems and institutional problems that hinder or undermine our work.”

Under the law in the Philippines, incommunicado detention is prohibited, he said. Detainees have a right to a lawyer, and lawyers must be able to locate and gain access to their client. However, military personnel often forbid attorneys from accessing detainees, citing national security concerns, Guillen said. Detainees often can only consult a public defender when they have reached court, he said — after they likely have been interrogated, tortured, threatened into signing documents, or forced to make inaccurate statements against their will.

Similarly, in military-controlled areas, human rights workers are unable to gain access to victims or potential witnesses. “The police and the military restrict areas, preventing independent organizations and human rights groups from gathering evidence and giving legal services to the victims,” Guillen said. Without these independent actors, the people conducting investigations into human rights violations are often themselves the perpetrators, he underscored, which undermines the integrity of accountability processes.

One of the key ways that Duterte’s regime justifies its violation of human rights is “red-tagging,” Czarina Golda Musni, Secretary-General of NUPL–Mindanao, explained. She defined red-tagging in her presentation as a form of public vilification of a person or group that often involves labeling human rights lawyers and defenders as communists “and thus an enemy of the state.” Musni noted that critics and dissenters of the government are “mostly marginalized peoples,” including “Indigenous peoples asserting their rights to self-determination, domestic and overseas workers demanding just and humane conditions of work, or the urban poor fighting for free, adequate, and decent housing.” She also pointed out that the youth have been demanding “affordable and quality education” and many church workers have been supporting and serving these causes only to be red-tagged.

“I, myself, have been red-tagged. And NUPL, as an organization, has been red-tagged under the Duterte Administration,” Musni said. “The red-tagging itself is a multitude of human rights violations. Not only do we experience increased surveillance which violates our right to security of our persons and property ... those who have been red-tagged have been accused of false and fabricated criminal charges which violate the right to due process of law. And, of course, red-tagging can cause forced migration, whether domestic or international, which also violates our right to security.”

In her closing remarks, Musni urged members of the Yale community to sign on to a letter calling on Connecticut’s senators to pass H.R. 3884, the Philippine Human Rights Act. The Act would suspend U.S. provision of security assistance to the Philippines in response to the grave human rights abuses committed by the country’s military and police.