IN a news conference after his second State of the Nation Address on June 24, President Duterte unleashed another tirade against the Commission on Human Rights (CHR): “Iyong CHR…you are better abolished. I will not allow my men to go there to be investigated.”
According to Duterte, if the CHR wants to investigate members of the police and the military, the body should course its requests through the Office of the President.
“The Armed Forces is under me and the police are under me. Kaya kapag kinwestiyon mo sila for investigation, dumaan muna sa akin,” he explained.
We concur with the view of the CHR that Duterte seems to have a wrong understanding of the body’s mandate under the Constitution.
The 1987 Constitution says the task of the CHR as an independent office shall be to “investigate, on its own or on complaint by any party, all forms of human-rights violations involving civil and political rights.”
The Bill of Rights under the 1987 Constitution provides: “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law, nor shall any person be denied the equal protection of the law.” And among the rights that should be protected by the State is “the [inviolable] right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizure, of whatever nature and for any purpose.”
In short, the CHR’s mandate is to ensure that the government and agencies under it are held liable for violations of human rights.
Duterte said he wants the CHR to investigate the New People’s Army’s (NPA) ambush on the Presidential Security Group in Cotabato last month.
But cases such as this are beyond the mandate of the CHR, since the NPA, as a rebel organization, operates outside the ambit of the law. The proper organization to investigate cases of attacks by rebels and criminals is the Philippine National Police.
By himself, Duterte cannot abolish the CHR. The Constitution needs to be revised if he wants the CHR to be abolished. If the CHR is abolished by the people themselves in a referendum-plebiscite called to determine whether they approve of a new Constitution, that would be a big tragedy as that would open the floodgates to human-rights violations by the agencies that should be the first to respect human rights: the police and the Armed Forces.
Bigger population spells trouble
Have you noticed that more and more, Metro Manila is getting overcrowded, with too many people bringing decades-old mass-transit systems to near-breaking point and exacerbating urban blight by living in slum communities where they have to cope with inadequate social services?
That’s because the Philippines now ranks 13th among countries with the biggest population in the world, a notch above our previous 12th spot.
As of July 1 this year, according to the Population Commission (Popcom), the Philippines has an estimated 104.3 million population. In 2014 the UN ranked the Philippines as the 12th-most populated country with 100 million people.
That means in two-and-a-half years, our population increased by 4.3 million, or an annual population growth rate of 1.5 percent. That’s partly the result of too many families, especially from the economically disadvantaged sectors, lacking access to reproductive-health services because of a temporary restraining order (TRO) by the Supreme Court.
We asked the executive director of the Popcom, Dr. Juan Antonio Perez III, to be one of our guests at our weekly Saturday Forum at Annabel’s last Saturday to brief us on this issue.
At the outset, Perez disputed the pronouncement of Chief Justice Maria Lourdes A. Sereno that the June 2015 TRO on contraceptives covers only subdermal implants.
He said Sereno was referring only to the second part of the TRO, which restrained the government from using contraceptive implants Implanon and Implanon NXT.
Perez explained that the first part of the TRO “specifically ordered the Food and Drug Administration [FDA] to refrain from ‘granting any and all pending applications for registration and/or recertification for contraceptive drugs and devices.’”
“[The] TRO affects not only implants but also pills, [which] also infringes on 700,000 women’s right to choose,” he added.
Perez pointed out the “urgency of the situation and stressed that there is a burgeoning public-health emergency if the TRO will not be lifted.”
“Because of the TRO, the FDA could not recertify 30 out of 47 contraceptives with expired registrations, and as long as the TRO persists, more and more contraceptives will lose their certificates of product registration,” Perez said.
“The TRO, thus, affects almost 200,000 implant users and 500,000 POP users. The TRO, therefore, affects not only contraceptive implants, but also the POPs which are now out of stock in the Department of Health warehouses.”
E-mail: ernhil@yahoo.com.