As Filipinos return to the polling precinct next month, Bulatlat, the Philippines’ longest-running online alternative news and authority in human rights reporting, has revisited the stand of those running for president and vice president on issues confronting the marginalized and the oppressed. This is part of Bulatlat’s commitment to truth-telling, defending press freedom, and resisting…
“The views of candidates on the ATA [Anti-Terror Act] are relevant in weighing their standpoint on human rights and democracy – with the ATA considered by petitioners at the Supreme Court as a law that can be most dangerously used to silence political dissent.”
“Sometimes, the government is forced to do something depending on the resistance of the people outside the congress. “Even if the fight is hard inside, we can make it work through the support of the masses outside.”
Practically all the petitioners and their lawyers who have spoken up welcomed these two rulings. However, they found these inadequate, arguing that other provisions that would similarly curtail civil and political rights should be declared unconstitutional as well.
By DEE AYROSO
Trauma continues to haunt women relatives of farmers and activists who fell victims to extrajudicial killings in the last five years of the Duterte presidency. The pain they have to live with never really goes away and has turned their lives around.
“It is terrifying to see so much state power wielded with impunity against the powerless, defenseless and innocent. Yet it is also tragicomic that the high and mighty would plunge into such a squalid abyss for such puny gains, and ultimately counterproductive outcomes.”
Karapatan called the ATC a ‘copy-paste’ of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) that ‘incites violence’ now legitimized by the Anti-Terror Law.
“How can the ATC, three years hence, claim to have ‘verified and validated information’ against these peace consultants when it has already been proven in court that there is none? The ATC regurgitating false assertions has been a most dangerous weapon especially in the heat of oral arguments on the terror law.”
“But even if we mark World Press Freedom Day with many reasons to be fearful, we mark it also with hope, knowing that there are many of us still working each day to gather facts and shine a little light on what is happening in the country and on what isn’t.”
Human rights lawyer Neri Colmenares assailed Solicitor General Jose Calida for red tagging him and other progressive legislators during the online oral arguments on the Anti-Terror Law, April 27.