On Duterte’s 3rd State of the Nation Address (SONA), political prisoners (PPs) from various jails across the country joined their voices to call for justice and demand accountability for the crimes and rights violations perpetrated by the Duterte regime. As of June 2018, Karapatan documented 509 political prisoners in the country. Of this number, 179…
“In line with its counterinsurgency program, the Duterte regime kills 2 per week and arrests 20 individuals in the same period – many of the victims are farmers and indigenous peoples. No doubt this figure will be whitewashed to give way to the administration’s conjured version of an imagined state of the nation. The reality…
Global civil society alliance CIVICUS and the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD) expressed concern over the worsening cases of rights violation in the Philippines, citing the recent illegal arrest and detention of 13 human rights defenders in General Santos City, Mindanao last July 4, 2018. While 11 were released on July…
“The Bureau of Immigration order being used to justify the persecution of Sr. Patricia Fox is both vague and arbitrary, certainly a dangerous tool for foul-mouthed and tyrannical leaders who fear international solidarity. Sr. Fox deserves to stay in the country, surely more than the parasites in government who have willingly plundered and violated the…
“This is the Duterte regime’s version of peace – terrorizing communities and strengthening military rule over civilians. This trend has progressively worsened under Duterte, with the Armed Forces of the Philippines turning indigenous and peasant communities into their playground for rights abuses. Their unwanted presence in rural areas has once again caused the evacuation of…
Karapatan decried the arrest of thirteen human rights defenders and church development workers on the evening of July 4, 2018 in General Santos City, during a program consultation of volunteers and partners of the Iglesia Filipino Independiente- Visayas Mindanao Regional Office for Development (IFI-VIMROD) on peasant and Lumad issues at the Mother Francisca Spirituality Center…
Karapatan deplores the dehumanizing strip search of a female drug suspect in a police station in Makati City as an act of cruel and degrading treatment of a person arrested and/or detained. Police personnel who were involved in the said act should be meted out with punishment under the Anti-Torture Law, while their superiors should…
In the past days, officials of the Duterte administration and the Armed Forces of the Philippines took turns in justifying the regime’s full-scale war against the Filipino people and suppression of political dissent, as if the current human rights situation isn’t precarious as it is with the all-out assault on civil liberties and people’s rights. …