By Communist Party of the Philippines
The Communist Party of the Philippines highly commends the human rights report submitted to the United Nations General Assembly last Friday by Prof. Philip Alston, the UN Commission on Human Rights’ (UNCHR) Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions. The 21-page final report reflected the same findings in the initial report Professor Alston submitted earlier this year to the UNCHR.
Download 21-page report to the Third Committee of the U.N. General Assembly
Download statement of Prof. Alston to the U.N. General Assembly
The Communist Party of the Philippines highly commends the human rights report submitted to the United Nations General Assembly last Friday by Prof. Philip Alston, the UN Commission on Human Rights’ (UNCHR) Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions. The 21-page final report reflected the same findings in the initial report Professor Alston submitted earlier this year to the UNCHR.
The Arroyo government sent Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita to the assembly in a last-ditch effort to mitigate the report, to no avail.
The final Alston Report found the Philippines to be among 30 countries in the world identified for credible reports of extrajudicial executions. The report correctly pinpointed the Arroyo government’s “counterinsurgency” design, Oplan Bantay Laya, as the major reason for the spate of extrajudicial killings of leftist activists in the six years so far of the Arroyo regime. Under Oplan Bantay Laya, leaders and members of democratic civil society organizations branded as “fronts” of the Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed group the New People’s Army are targeted for execution (placed in the “order of battle” in military parlance). Key leftist “civil society leaders including human rights defenders, trade unionists, land reform advocates and others” are “systematically hunt(ed) down…, (and) are often killed following a campaign of individual vilification designed to instill fear into the community.”
The report also noted the killing of journalists in the country “with increasing frequency as a result of the prevailing impunity together with the structure of the media industry,” the killings in agrarian reform conflicts with the police providing “inadequate protection to the peasants,” the killings by vigilante death squads, “with men routinely killing street children and others in broad daylight” and the “human rights abuses related to conflicts in western Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago.”
Alston condemned the vilification and persecution of the victims themselves, while their killers go scot free. “The priorities of the criminal justice system have also been distorted, and it has increasingly focused on prosecuting civil society leaders rather than their killers.”
The report also concluded that “the military was in a state of denial concerning the numerous extrajudicial executions in which its soldiers were implicated” and said that it found “strikingly unconvincing” the military’s effort to pass the blame for the killings on the NPA’s “large-scale purge.” The report denounced the military’s “purge theory” as “a cynical attempt to displace responsibility.”
The US-Arroyo regime should not only be thrown out and replaced the soonest possible time, based on the well-founded and documented findings of Alston Report as well as many other reports and earlier public trials in the Philippines and abroad. It should also be charged and punished for its brutal and fascist crimes against humanity.
Download 21-page report to the Third Committee of the U.N. General Assembly
Download statement of Prof. Alston to the U.N. General Assembly
