BY FR. SHAY CULLEN
EVERYONE should reflect on their life and dignity and if their rights are respected and upheld. Those doing the upholding are human rights workers that stand for the oppressed and the poor. They are great people, Filipinos included, working in a world that is losing respect for human rights. The dedicated defenders of human rights of the people and the environment are dying for their beliefs.
In the Philippines alone in 2020, there were 25 human rights activists killed according to the International Federation of Human Rights. In the first six months of 2021, another 15 were assassinated. The dedicated human rights workers are branded as rebels, subversives or terrorists. They even become prime targets for the government-sponsored death squads. Between 12,000 and 30,000 people have been killed in the “drug war.”
The government’s own data shows more than 6,190 people were killed in police operations from 2016 to August 2021. Global Witness reports that 19 environmentalists were killed in the Philippines in 2021. However, 30 were killed in 2020. An estimated 270 people’s land defenders were killed in the Philippines between 2012 and 2021. Many of the killings were related to protests against deforestation and mining corporations. In fact, they are the true Filipino heroes standing up for the poor and the oppressed, the true Christians giving their lives for their friends.
No arrests, no evidence, no trials are needed by the authorities; just the nod of the chief and there is a police raid and a suspect is killed. Most often, the finger-pointing is by an informant with no evidence. This is on-going and it must stop if the Philippine people are to be recognized as a civilized people with universal respect for human rights and dignity and live free of tyranny, fear, poverty and violence. They must demand that their human rights are respected if ever the Philippines will become a true democracy. Historically, a vastly wealthy dynastic fiefdom of conglomerates of ruling families and corporate moguls, numbering a few thousand, run the country and own 46 percent of the total wealth among them.
The human rights of children to live free of fear of trafficking, rape and sexual abuse in their families and community and on-line, have to be protected. The government and the telecom corporations have the prime duty to do this under RA 11903.The long lock-downs during the height of the pandemic is having repercussions until the present. Children are going back to school and are revealing to teachers and classmates how they were sexually abused by their fathers, other relatives or live-in partners of their mothers and their rights violated. The reports of online sexual abuse of children has soared during the pandemic and it is continuing until the present.
As previously reported, the number of online child sexual abuse reports received by the Philippine government cyber-crime office is staggering. According to the Department of Justice (DOJ), as reported by the media, there was an increase of 264.63 percent in the number of Filipino children sexually abused on the Internet during the pandemic in 2021. However, it’s impossible to know the number of children abused on-line as it is a crime on very small children done in secret within families. It is tragic for thousands of Filipino children to suffer and endure such abuse perpetrated by their parents and relatives to earn money from foreign pedophiles. (To be continued)/PN
