Rights group KARAPATAN asked the Filipino people to once more take to the streets on International Human Rights Day on December 10th and demand accountability from the Ferdinand Marcos Jr. government for systemic corruption as well as grave civil and political rights violations.
In what may be the last major protest rally of the year, the group said Marcos Jr.’s leading role in bureaucratic plunder must be underscored before the new year is welcomed with more protests.
KARAPATAN said the president had been made to feel the heat this year, compelled to have lower-ranking bureaucrats linked to anomalous infrastructure projects charged and arrested.
“He has been forced to ease out certain key officials of his regime in a desperate attempt to deflect attention from himself,” the country’s most active group of rights defenders added.
The group in a press conference on Tuesday said government corruption is a human rights issue, pointing out that the government hits protesters with violations such as mass arrests, police brutality and filing of criminal charges.
“Marcos Jr.’s police forces unleashed their brutality during the September 21 protests by beating up and arbitrarily arresting more than 200 demonstrators and bystanders and causing the deaths of two individuals,” KARAPATAN said.
It also accused the government of attempting to sabotage last November 30’s anti-corruption rally by enforcing martial law-era “no permit-no rally” laws and threatening to charge protesters who call for his resignation with sedition and related offenses.
“Fascist terror, already an everyday reality in vast areas of the countryside, is now becoming a staple in urban centers of reactionary power rocked by people’s protests,” the group said.
The rights group said the scaled-up violence is not incidental as it hews with the Marcos Jr. regime’s National Action Plan for Unity, Peace and Development (NAP-UPD), a blueprint for heightened repression and authoritarianism.
With the NAP-UPD, more extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and unjust arrests and detention on trumped-up charges of activists, dissenters and other perceived enemies of the state loom in the horizon, it said.
“Marcos Jr. is increasingly mobilizing his entire repressive machinery to crack down on the anti-corruption protest movement which has begun reverberating calls for an overhaul of the system,” it added.
Like the November 30 nationwide protests, the annual December 10 rally must defiantly push through in the face of threats and intimidation from Marcos Jr.’s minions, KARAPATAN said.
“The times are indeed ripe and the people ready to push for meaningful change. On the 10th of December, the streets will once again swell with undaunted protesters crying: Marcos at Duterte, korap at pasista, panagutin, ikulong!” the group said. # (Raymund B. Villanueva)
