of the Philippines the criminal justice system is - Article 2

the killings
are—contrary to
the conclusion
of the Melo
Commission—
certainly
attributable
to the military
organisation
and the state
itself ....
“
”
24
a member of the International Labour Rights Fund was refused
entry to the Philippines; he had earlier joined a mission on labour
rights and extrajudicial killings of labour leaders in the
Philippines during May 2006, and had been actively working with
local groups that have been labelled as “enemies of the state”.
Others have been taken away for no more than noncooperation.
Brothers Reynaldo and Raymond Manalo were
arrested and allegedly forcibly disappeared by armed men
identifying themselves as soldiers who entered their house in
February 2006, after they had refused to cooperate with troops
trying to locate their neighbour and for not participating in a
meeting called by the military on their anti-insurgency campaign
(story 95).
Whereas the highest levels of government should be issuing
explicit orders to prohibit the use of public labelling by soldiers
and law-enforcement officers, the practice is becoming
increasingly widespread, and is now virtually a de facto policy.
National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales has pushed for
official labelling of party list political organisations with supposed
links to the communist movement in the forthcoming May 2007
elections. Gonzales has not named specific parties himself, but
five alone were listed in the army’s “Knowing the Enemy”
presentation, and unsurprisingly the proposal is known to be
popular among the military. The effect of such tagging of
registered political parties would be just short of declaring them
illegal, and would imply that any persons voting for them are
also “influenced by communists”. And in case anybody is as yet
in any doubt about the implications of that tag, Major Michael
Samson, the military Civil Relations Service group commander,
said in an interview of 18 January 2007 that, “In the Armed
Forces’ continued campaign against communism, those that
were either supportive or sympathetic to the communist
movement were considered as enemies of the state.”
The wider consequences on the Philippines’ electoral system
and democracy would be profound and far-reaching. Tagging not
only exposes individual political organisations and persons to
violence and persecution, but undermines the entire exercise
of government and challenges the rights of all citizens to
participate in legitimate political activities.
The persistent official tolerance of public labelling of persons
and organisations as “communist fronts” by military and other
security officers speaks to the complicity of the government in
the unremitting killings and violence throughout the Philippines.
For this reason the killings are—contrary to the conclusion of
the Melo Commission—certainly attributable to the military
organisation and the state itself. Official tolerance excuses
policing and prosecuting agencies from their abject failure to
successfully identify and prosecute perpetrators. It is
contradictory to accept, as the commission has done, that there
exists a pattern of killings that can be linked to the military
while denying that this a systemic problem that goes to the heart
of the rot in the Philippine criminal justice system.
article 2 • February 2007 Vol. 6, No. 1