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Hundreds of students and activists held a protest inside UP-Cebu grounds to call for the junking of Anti-Terror Bill but policemen forcibly entered the campus and arrested seven protesters.
"Only cowards are afraid of dissent.”
Both UN experts called on everyone to denounce governments’ failure to respond to the needs of the people in the time of the pandemic.
The National Union of Peoples Lawyers (NUPL), counsel for Anakbayan, lambasted the NTF-ELCAC “for capitalizing on a familial conflict and turning it into a witch-hunt for members of Anakbayan and the Kabataan Partylist, which are legitimate organizations advancing the Filipino youth’s aspirations for national democracy.”
On the same day that Kadamay Secretary General Carlito Badion was killed, members of urban poor groups in Rizal province were summoned by the military to clear their names from the list of alleged communists.
“The legislation can be used to violate people rights in the same way the Bayanihan Act was used for mass arrests of ECQ [enhanced community quarantine] violators. Only the anti-terror law is 100x worse.”
"Badion championed the cause of the homeless and the informally settled. He was instrumental in Kadamay's housing occupation campaigns and community barricades against demolition."
“He is a jolly person, always on the go. He was full of energy and loves to mingle with everyone.”
“This chain of death is precisely the reason which we families of prisoners sought to avert with our petition to release vulnerable prisoners in order to save human life.”
“With the trail of killings, illegal arrest and detention, and other criminal acts committed in the course of the implementation of the local synchronized enhanced management of police operations (SEMPO) in Negros, which were committed under his purview, he is in no way ‘good and honest.’ ”
Labor group Kilusang Mayo Uno slammed the “double standard on the implementation of ECQ rules,” pointing out that this was not the first time police “exercised brutality instead of compassion amid the COVID crisis.”
Without mass testing and availability of more testing centers, a molecular biologist reiterated that the Philippines cannot isolate and treat COVID-19 patients.
The arrests and the disproportionate show of force were likened to the “shock-and-awe tactics of Oplan Sauron” in Negros Island.
Karapatan Rizal was quick to point out that the incident was only the latest in a series of “harassment and delaying tactics” performed by the 80th IB designed to “deny the family of their latest victim justice and hide their crimes.”
Human rights watchdog Karapatan Quezon assailed his arrest, stating that military "should be doing service to the people and assisting them in the fight against the pandemic" instead of going on an all-out attack against them.
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