Editorial in the Inquirer on Special Rapporteur’s report on the Philippines

An editorial in the Inquirer on 28 November discussed the Special Rapporteur’s report and said that “those who care for out country ought to read it”:

The final report of United Nations Special Rapporteur Philip Alston on “extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions” in the Philippines is unsettling but essential reading. Those who care for our country ought to read it. It is not merely an indictment of the military for its role in the killings, it is also a comprehensive indictment of the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo administration itself.

We say comprehensive, because while the focus of the report is on the administration’s appalling human rights record, the pattern of official policy and unofficial mendacity, the culture of impunity, that has come to mark the administration and its allies (and that is accurately reflected in the final report) explain other failures of the administration, too.

Let’s consider some of the less written-about findings. Some of Alston’s sharpest words, for example, are aimed at Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez. Her office, he writes, “has done almost nothing in recent years to investigate the involvement of government officials in extrajudicial executions.” That kind of track record is simply indefensible, but Alston, a professor of law, probes deeper and concludes that the “Office of the Ombudsman has surrendered its constitutionally-mandated independence from the executive branch.” Considering the special role the powerful office plays in the administration of justice, this is a chilling but not unjustified conclusion. What exactly does he mean by that? He offers several answers, including possibly the most damaging of them all: “The Office of the Ombudsman often operates as a de facto subsidiary of the Department of Justice.”

That a constitutional officer like Gutierrez, one of the few so-called impeachable officials in the government, finds herself effectively a subordinate to a rankly political alter ego of the President like Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez is a legal calamity. It explains why, as Alston writes, “Despite having received a significant number of complaints alleging extrajudicial executions attributed to state agents, no information was provided by the Ombudsman’s office indicating that it had undertaken any productive investigations.” It also explains why, to give just one of many possible examples, the Mega-Pacific anomaly became the perfect crime.

Alston also takes aim at National Security Adviser Bert Gonzales: “Senior government officials are attempting to use prosecutions to dismantle the numerous civil society organizations and party-list groups that they believe to be fronts for the CPP [Communist Party of the Philippines]. While this project is sometimes discussed as if it were a dark conspiracy, it was explained to me openly and directly by numerous officials as the very function of IALAG [Inter-Agency Legal Action Group], which was established in 2006.” And who runs IALAG? Real “institutional power and legal authority over its operations is concentrated in the Office of the National Security Adviser.”

Alston concludes: “The most deleterious role played by IALAG bodies may be to encourage prosecutors to act as team players with the AFP [Armed Forces of the Philippines] and PNP [Philippine National Police] in counterinsurgency operations and to de-prioritize cases involving the deaths of leftist activists.” This explains not only the rehashed charges against party-list leaders but also the administration’s convenient resurrection, as necessity dictates, of the communist bogeyman.

Alston also takes Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte to task for the killings (over 500 since 1998) commonly attributed to the so-called Davao Death Squad. “The mayor’s positioning is frankly untenable: He dominates the city so thoroughly as to stamp out whole genres of crime, yet he [says he] remains powerless in the face of hundreds of murders committed by men without masks in view of witnesses.” This is the same mayor whom the President calls on for law and order advice, which helps explain the administration’s cavalier attitude toward killings and its embrace of generals who leave a trail of blood behind, like Jovito Palparan.

It was the Arroyo administration that invited the United Nations to send an expert to investigate the extrajudicial killings; it made sense to do so, even if only from a public-relations perspective. But now that Alston’s final and damning report is in, will the administration try to use PR to kill the message and shoot the messenger?