Dec 2, 2021 | DFF, Statements
Lawmakers across Southeast Asia have come under drastically increased threats and harassment in the past year, in-part due to the military coup in Myanmar, but also troubling developments elsewhere in the region, a new report by ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR) has found.
The number of Members of Parliament (MPs) detained in Southeast Asia has dramatically risen this year, from just one in 2020, to 91 in 2021, APHR found in its new report Parliamentarians at Risk: Reprisals against opposition MPs in Southeast Asia in 2021. This sudden spike was largely due to developments in Myanmar, where the military seized power in a coup in February, however there have also been alarming developments elsewhere in the region, including Thailand, the Philippines, and Malaysia, APHR said. Although not featured in detail in the report, former opposition lawmakers have also been targeted in Cambodia.
“This year has been yet another dark year for human rights in Southeast Asia, and as our region slides deeper into the grasp of authoritarianism, elected lawmakers have been among those heavily targeted, particularly those standing up for basic decency, human rights, and democracy,” said Teddy Baguilat Jr, an APHR Board Member and former Philippines Member of Parliament (MP). “Developments in Myanmar have been particularly troubling, where the political opposition has come under assault by the junta, but there are also concerns elsewhere, with governments utilizing COVID-19 to undermine opposition MPs, and erode the important oversight role they play in a democracy.”
“On top of MPs being locked up merely for fulfilling their mandates as representatives of the people, we have also witnessed threats to lawmakers for doing their jobs, as well as orchestrated campaigns of judicial harassment and disinformation, aimed at both discrediting and silencing them,” Baguilat said.
Amid the ongoing human rights catastrophe in Myanmar, the political opposition, in particular members of the National League for Democracy (NLD), which won the 2020 election in a landslide, has been among the most prominent targets. The junta has suspended all national and sub-national parliaments, and stripped democratically elected MPs of their seats without legal or constitutional justification. At least 90 parliamentarians remain in detention or house arrest, while many others have gone into hiding to avoid the same fate.
“Not content with stealing the result of the 2020 election away from the people, the military junta in Myanmar has sought to justify its power grab by shutting down parliament, declaring groups formed by democratically-elected MPs as ‘illegal’, and jailing almost 100 of those MPs on the most spurious of charges,” said Charles Santiago, APHR Chair and a Malaysian MP. “Over the past year, the Myanmar people have said loud and clear who their representatives are – those they elected in the 2020 election – and all international actors, including ASEAN, must condemn the Myanmar military in the strongest possible terms, call for the release of all those arbitrarily detained since the coup, including MPs, and for the country to be put back on the democratic path.”
While the situation in Myanmar has dominated headlines, lawmakers were also at risk elsewhere in Southeast Asia, notably Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand, APHR said.
In Malaysia, in January the government of then-Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin used the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to impose a state of emergency, while parliament was suspended for more than seven months. Opposition politicians were among those targeted in a growing crackdown on dissent, with at least ten lawmakers interrogated or charged for expressing criticism related to human rights abuses or the suspension of parliament.
In the Philippines, disinformation campaigns, threats and so-called “red-tagging” of opposition lawmakers rose alarmingly ahead of the general elections taking place in 2022, while President Rodrigo Duterte and other senior officials made baseless accusations against left-wing lawmakers, claiming they support an armed communist insurgency. Senator Leila de Lima remains in prison, and has now been arbitrarily detained for close to five years.
Meanwhile, in Thailand, the government and its allies continued to level trumped-up criminal cases against Move Forward Party (MFP) lawmakers, while opposition MPs were also the target of widespread abuse online, often through highly coordinated “information operations” orchestrated by state-affiliated actors.
“An attack on an MP is an attack on democracy. The systematic harassment of MPs – whether online, offline, judicial or otherwise – is clearly aimed at preventing them from doing their jobs, and acting as a check and balance on behalf of the people,” said Baguilat Jr. “The role of MPs is absolutely crucial in a democracy, particularly during the pandemic of the last two years, or as elections approach, as is the case in the Philippines and Cambodia.”
“Amid the assault on democracy we are witnessing across the region, those working to protect it must come together and act as one unified voice. We call on our governments across Southeast Asia to do everything in their power to protect the human rights of all MPs, and urge our fellow parliamentarians to call out the abuses they see at every turn,” Baguilat said.
Click here for a Myanmar translation of this statement
Click here for a Bahasa Indonesian translation of this statement
Click here for a Khmer translation of this statement
Click here for a Lao translation of this statement
Click here for a Malay translation of this statement
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Dec 2, 2021 | DFF, Reports
Across Southeast Asia, parliamentarians are increasingly at risk. Lawmakers who use their mandates to defend human rights or to hold power to account have for years been targeted through trumped-up criminal charges, threats and harassment, physical violence, and detention. In 2021, we continued to see MPs targeted, to a large extent because of the military coup in Myanmar and its devastating aftermath, but also due to alarming developments elsewhere.
This briefing from ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR) provides an overview of human rights abuses against elected lawmakers in Southeast Asia. The findings in 2021 are stark, and APHR must unfortunately report that the situation facing MPs has only deteriorated further. The number of detained lawmakers in the region rose from just one in 2020, to 91 in 2021 due to the Myanmar military regime’s wave of arrests. In fact, Myanmar has previously been a country where APHR has rarely documented abuses against MPs, but it has now joined the ranks of Southeast Asian states repressing lawmakers.
The coup in Myanmar is the most dramatic example of a wider trend of closing democratic space in the region. In countries where APHR has previously documented abuses against MPs, such as Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand, authorities continued to level baseless criminal charges against opposition MPs, while often also being implicated in or failing to prevent or effectively investigate threats, online abuse, and disinformation campaigns against lawmakers. In 2021, the resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic in the region also served as an apparent excuse to justify the silencing of democratic debate, either by targeting lawmakers exercising their freedom of expression to scrutinize official measures, or by suspending parliament, as was the case in Malaysia.
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Apr 8, 2021 | DFF, Opinion Articles
By Walden Bello
This article was first published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer
Every day since the military coup of Feb. 1, the people have been taking to the streets in protest in all parts of Myanmar. Over 400 people have been killed by police and soldiers firing indiscriminately on crowds of protestors, or murdered randomly in dragnets carried out by day or under cover of darkness.
But instead of diminishing, the protests have escalated, drawing people from all walks of life—workers and peasants, students and professionals, parents and children. Supporting their children’s fight for a new Myanmar, parents have taken to scrawling the names, cellphone numbers, and blood types of their children on their arms and clothes for identification and assistance should they be killed or wounded.
Beyond going out to the streets in protest, the people of Myanmar have brought the country to a halt. The guns of the military have now been answered with the people’s weapon: Their power to paralyze the economy.
The illegitimate military regime is isolated domestically. It is also isolated internationally. World opinion is reflected in United Nations Secretary General António Guterres’ stern call on the putschists to “Stop the repression immediately. Release the prisoners. End the violence. Respect human rights, and the will of the people expressed in recent elections. Coups have no place in our modern world.”
The Myanmar coup has placed the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) on the spot. In a region where the lives of 650 million people are indissolubly linked politically and economically, the old principle of “non-intervention in the internal affairs” of other member countries that has long governed inter-state relations is anachronistic. The governments of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore have recognized this in their historic call for a regional summit on recent developments in Myanmar.
Manila has not yet joined this call, which is really disappointing and ironic given that the democratic political system we have owes its existence to a people’s uprising in 1986.
Apparently, the Duterte administration is still hesitant to fully break with its previous policy of refraining from any criticism of the Myanmar government, even of the latter’s inhuman policy of genocide toward the Rohingya people, that was put in place by Rep. Alan Peter Cayetano when he served as foreign secretary. Cayetano issued a controversial statement in September 2017, when the Philippines was Asean chair, that condemned attacks on the Myanmar military but omitted any reference to the military’s repression and forced displacement of the Rohingya, provoking protests from the Malaysian and Indonesian governments.
The shameful silence of Cayetano, an amateur political appointee in foreign affairs, was apparently in exchange for Myanmar’s silence in the face of the Duterte administration’s record of thousands of extrajudicial executions that were taking place at the time that was part and parcel of its war on drugs.
Cayetano is gone, and current Foreign Secretary Teddyboy Locsin appeared to depart from Cayetano’s ignominious policy in the days after the coup, calling for a “return to the status quo,” a move that was applauded by pro-democracy forces in Myanmar. He can now go further by fully supporting the call for a regional summit, as he is being urged by his counterparts in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
Myanmar is at a crossroads. The Feb. 1 coup was not a show of strength. It was an act of desperation. A decade of liberalization had given the people a taste of what full freedom would be after decades of stifling military rule, and they will not give up their dream. The Philippine government likewise is at a crossroads in its diplomacy toward Myanmar. It can either be part of the problem or part of the solution. Let it be the latter.
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Former congressman Walden Bello is the author of “Paradigm Trap: The Development Establishment’s Embrace of Myanmar and How to Break Loose” (2018), and a member of the board of the Asean Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR).
Mar 18, 2021 | DFF, Statements
The Philippine Government must face international accountability for its widespread killing of activists and human rights defenders, and the grave human rights violations it has committed, seven human rights groups said in a statement today.
On 7 March 2021, members of the Philippine National Police (PNP) and the military killed nine community-based activists and arrested six in coordinated raids across four provinces, in a massacre that highlighted the continuous attacks against the government’s critics. Two days prior to this incident, Duterte had issued a shoot-to-kill order targeting communist rebels, saying, “If the enemy is holding a gun, kill them. Kill them right away.” He further noted “Ignore human rights. That is my order.”
“Duterte’s inciting rhetoric and terrorist-tagging of human rights defenders, activists and critics have resulted in the harassment and violence against them, as well as their death. This demonstrates the increasingly dangerous space, not just for human rights defenders, but for all of civil society and the Philippine people at large,” said Shamini Darshni Kaliemuthu, Executive Director of FORUM-ASIA.
Under Duterte’s government, civil society and human rights defenders have found themselves in danger particularly for opposing the government’s ‘war on drugs’ and his repressive policies. Duterte has consistently incited violence against his critics, while blaming human rights defenders for the increase in the number of drug users. He has threatened to behead human rights activists, and justified the assassination of ‘corrupt journalists’, as he continues to promise protections to police who follow these orders. There have also been allegations where evidence was planted by the police and military forces to justify the violence.
“Despite the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights report that details widespread and systematic human rights violations by the government, including the killing of human rights defenders, and a subsequent resolution providing technical assistance on human rights to the government, the violence and harassment against rights defenders have only intensified. These killings highlight the need for an immediate international investigative mechanism to ensure accountability for all perpetrators,” the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders said.
This crackdown on civic space is being institutionalised through state policy. In July 2020, the government implemented an Anti-Terror Law which allows a Council composed of state officials to designate individuals as terrorists, without a court order. A local resolution targeting left-leaning personality with ‘drug-style’ operations was released in the Cordillera region in February 2021. Government officials, and the security sector continue to tag activists and civil society members as terrorists, communists and subversives in their public speeches, endangering their safety and security.
Since 2016 when Duterte took power, FORUM-ASIA has documented at least 59 killings, including extrajudicial killings of human rights defenders in the country.
“These attacks go beyond individual killings; they reinforce an environment where people are afraid to question and dissent, further perpetuating this cycle of impunity. This proves that the UN Human Rights Council’s recent resolution has been ineffective at stemming these violations, and the international community must immediately initiate clear and sustained action to hold the perpetrators to account,” said CIVICUS Asia Pacific researcher, Josef Benedict.
“Domestic human rights mechanisms remain compromised, while human rights defenders face threats every day. An international investigative mechanism for the extrajudicial killings related to the “war on drugs”, and the killings of rights defenders, is even more imperative today, than it has ever been,” said the groups.
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The Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA) is a Bangkok-based regional network of 81 member organisations across 21 Asian countries, with consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council, and consultative relationship with the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights. Founded in 1991, FORUM-ASIA works to strengthen movements for human rights and sustainable development through research, advocacy, capacity-development and solidarity actions in Asia and beyond. It has sub-regional offices in Geneva, Jakarta, and Kathmandu. www.forum-asia.org
The Asia Democracy Network (ADN) works to promote and advance democratisation and democratic governance at all levels of society through effective solidarity and cooperation among civil society organisations and democracy advocates in Asia. ADN is committed to building a just, equitable and sustainable community of democratic societies in Asia, where all human rights of all individuals, groups and peoples are fully respected and realised. www.adnasia.org
The ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR) is a regional network of current and former parliamentarians who use their unique positions to advance human rights and democracy in Southeast Asia. APHR seeks to help create a region where people can express themselves without fear, live free from all forms of discrimination and violence, and where development takes place with human rights at the forefront. www.aseanmp.org
The World Alliance for Citizen Participation (CIVICUS) is a global alliance of civil society organisations and activists dedicated to strengthening citizen action and civil society throughout the world. www.civicus.org
The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), within the framework of the Observatory for the Protection ofHuman Rights Defenders, is a non-partisan, non-sectarian, international non-governmental human rights organisation that federates 197 organisations from 117 countries. Founded in 1922 in Paris, FIDH is the world’s oldest human rights organisation. MDN has been a member of FIDH since 2019. www.fidh.org
Front Line Defenders was founded in Dublin in 2001 with the specific aim of protecting human rights defenders at risk (HRDs), people who work, non-violently, for any or all of the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Front Line Defenders addresses the protection needs identified by HRDs themselves. Front Line Defenders maintains its headquarters in Dublin, an EU Office in Brussels, and regionally-based field staff in the Americas, Asia, Africa, Europe & Central Asia, and the Middle East. www.frontlinedefenders.org
The World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT), within the framework of theObservatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, works with 200 member organisations to end torture and ill-treatment, assist victims, and protect human rights defenders at risk wherever they are. Together, we make up the largest global group actively standing up to torture in over 90 countries. We work to protect the most vulnerable members of our societies, including women, children, indigenous peoples, migrants and other marginalized communities. www.omct.org
Mar 17, 2021 | CCHR, Opinion Articles
By Sarah Elago
What does the future of Filipino women look like? This is something I have been thinking about for a long time.
In a world on track for a warming of more than three degrees celsius by the end of this century, the Philippines is set to suffer increasingly from disasters, deadly typhoons, droughts, flooding and much more. The Global Climate Risk Index 2015 lists the Philippines as the number one country most affected by climate change.
But why does this matter for women?
Today, climate-induced disasters in the Philippines routinely disrupt food production, resulting in food price hikes and income loss for rural workers. For example, during Typhoon Haiyan more than 600,000 hectares of farmland were destroyed, costing the Philippines an estimated PHP35 billion, or US$724 million. This loss of income is felt more heavily by rural women than men because they tend to farm smaller plots and work less hours. As a result, women may be forced to migrate to cities as they suffer from increased poverty and food insecurity.
During times of conflict and disasters, which are increasing due to climate change, women and young girls will be put in situations of increased vulnerability, which can lead to harmful coping strategies such as early marriage. It also means they are more susceptible to trafficking and sexual exploitation in exchange for food, shelter or income. This is particularly true of women from disadvantaged backgrounds and with low incomes who may be more constrained to deploy these strategies due to reduced opportunities.
Another impact caused by climate change and environmental degradation is the rising number of epidemics the world will face, such as COVID-19. What does that mean for women? In a country where there is widespread unemployment, underemployment and with women earning less, saving less, holding more insecure jobs than men, or living below or close to poverty, the economic downturns from these public health crises will hit women the most. Measures to tackle such epidemics, such as lockdowns, also lead to increases in gender-based violence against women and girls.
It is clear that for Filipino women, and those the world over, to have a better future, climate change needs to be taken more seriously. What we can do is push for the international community, and notably ASEAN member states, to respect the Paris Agreement. This starts with accelerating efforts to limit the increase of the world’s temperature and improving the ambition of their climate plans. This will also require speedily disinvesting from coal, scrapping all plans to build new coal power plants, such as in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam, and stopping our alarming rates of deforestation.
Meanwhile, aid and government programs should focus on rural as well as marginalized communities in the Philippines and integrate the specific situation and concerns of women to help populations adapt and mitigate the effects of climate change. They should focus on improving the situation of working women with low incomes, as well as poor female smallholder farmers.
As parliamentarians we can help achieve this by pushing for our governments to enhance their climate plans to the Paris Agreement—still not on track to meet its objective—and exercise our oversight function to uphold a system of checks and balances.
As citizens, we can get involved in women’s empowerment, ecological and climate justice movements to press governments to address the climate emergency, and promote and protect human rights at all times. It is imperative to continue raising our voices to demand transparency and accountability.
They will not do it on their own. Only through our collaborative efforts and active citizens’ participation will we be able to truly address the present multi-layered emergencies on climate, health, and rights, and improve the abysmal prospects of the next generation of women.
Sarah Elago is a Philippine Member of Parliament (MP) and Member of ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR)
This article was originally published in the Philippines Inquirer
