Human-rights advocates asked Congress on Wednesday to front-load passage of the human-rights defenders (HRDs) bill filed by detained Sen. Leila M. de Lima in a bid to “institutionalize and enforce state obligations for the protection of their rights.”
Citing the increasing incidents of attacks against human-rights defenders under the Duterte administration, former senator and human-rights lawyer Rene Saguisag sought to enlist the backing of former colleagues in the Senate for early enactment into law of de Lima’s Senate Bill (SB) 1699.
“Let us all support the bill at a time when a fellow Bedan prefers to kill pa more,” Saguisag said at a forum following the filing of the bill, referring to President Duterte, a San Beda College alumni like Saguisag.
Saguisag added: “We need support from everybody who cares.” He said the human-rights community is “back at work” as he noted that “the situation is looking to be worse than the human-rights abuses inflicted by the Marcos dictatorship.”
Advocates at the forum also cited reports that the pro-human rights group Karapatan has documented growing number cases involving attacks against human-rights defenders, amid findings that 84 human-rights defenders were killed, including 24 Karapatan members “doing field work documenting cases of human-rights violations.”
De Lima’s SB 1699 was expected to be referred to the Committee on Justice and Human Rights, chaired by Sen. Richard J. Gordon, after its first reading during on Wednesday’s Senate plenary session.
A counterpart bill has been filed in the House of Representatives by Party-list Rep. Carlos T. Isagani Zarate of Bayan Muna.
In filing SB 1699, de Lima stressed the need to establish an “effective legal remedy for the violation of the rights of HRDs.”
She added that “the obsessive attacks against these [human rights] concepts and principles, led by no less than the President himself, have rendered us, human-rights defenders, vulnerable and our work extremely difficult and dangerous.”
Moreover, de Lima recalled “how women human-rights defenders and activists in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community have become vulnerable not only to killings and harassment, but also to misogynistic attacks and sexual violence.”
In a news statement read during a media briefing, de Lima said she found it “very urgent that we come forward and claim our right, as human-rights defenders, to be recognized and protected. Not for our personal sake, but for the sake of our dignity as a people.”
At the same time, the senator denounced Duterte’s public declaration last year that he will order the shooting of human-rights workers as it “clearly places human-rights defenders under threat and encourages culture of impunity.”
She lamented that “enforced disappearance, death, harassment, suppression of fundamental human-rights and freedoms are continuing challenges of individuals and the organizations to which they belong. This does not escape notice from outside the Philippines.”
For instance, de Lima cited a March 2017 report of human-rights group Frontline Defenders, which claimed that 15 HRDs working on various issues have been killed in a span of just three months.
“Governments are often annoyed, defensive and hostile toward interventions of advocates, but that should not be the case,” she said.
Once enacted into law, she added, Senate Bill 1699, to be known as the Human Rights Defenders Act of 2018, will mandate that “it is the government’s obligation to ensure protection of HRDs against intimidation and unlawful intrusion by any public or private individual.”
De Lima’s bill provides it is also the responsibility of the government under the proposed measure to conduct investigation “whenever there is reasonable ground to believe that a human-rights defender has been killed, disappeared, tortured, ill-treated, arbitrarily detained, threatened or subject to a violation of any of the rights…”
“The state must ensure that a prompt, thorough, effective, independent and impartial investigation is conducted with due diligence and is prosecuted as appropriate,” she added.
The measure, likewise, affirms the rights and freedoms of HRDs from defamation and harassment “in all forms of media and communication, and whether by public authorities or private actors, in association with his or her status, activities or work as a human-rights defender.”
Under the bill, the Commission on Human Rights shall exercise the functions of a protection mechanism for all HRDs in accordance with its constitutional mandate, pertinent laws and guidelines, as well as standards governing the functions and responsibilities of a national human-rights institution.