Marcos task force to whitewash labor rights violations – group

MANILA, Philippines — President Marcos’ inter-agency committee tasked to probe the extrajudicial killings and harassment of workers will just whitewash labor right violations, human rights group Karapatan said yesterday.

Karapatan secretary general Cristina Palabay said yesterday Executive Order No. 23, which created the committee, will simply go the way of other investigative bodies created earlier for similar purposes.

“It will become nothing more than an elaborate instrument to temporarily mollify the people’s anger and eventually whitewash the state’s responsibility for extrajudicial killings and other grave human rights violations in the labor sector,” she said in a statement.

Palabay said it will go the way of its predecessor, the Task Force on Administrative Order 35 (TF AO35), which was created in November 2012 by former president Benigno Aquino III ostensibly to “resolve unsolved cases of political violence in the form of extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, torture and other grave violations of the right to life, liberty and security of persons.”

Nine years after its inception, Palabay said TF AO35 boasted of having handled 385 cases, covering four administrations since 2001. It reported handling 270 cases of extrajudicial killings, 28 cases of enforced disappearance, seven cases on International Humanitarian Law and 80 cases of torture.

During the same period, Karapatan said it documented 1,953 extrajudicial killings, 252 enforced disappearances and 1,570 victims of torture, nearly nine times more than the 385 cases handled by TF AO35.

Palabay said the task force has attained convictions in only 13 cases, or only about three percent of the 385 cases it handled.

The Commission on Human Rights welcomed the creation of the inter-agency panel and expressed hope that it would be impartial, noting that some workers’ organizations have been subjected to profiling and red-tagging for their causes. – Janvic Mateo