By Fernan Angeles
TRIBESMEN in the upland often mistaken as insurgents and terrorists have joined the fray, and filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to declare the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 null and void, alleging that the law violates their right to self-determination.
Officers of Indigenous People’s alliance KATRIBU, Muslim activist and 2019 senatorial candidate Samira Gutoc, Lumad leaders, and other Moro and IP organizations filed at least the 26th petition against the controversial new law.
The latest batch of petitioners said the right to self-determination, which is guaranteed by the Constitution, entails the right to oppose and criticize “development aggression and the policy of militarization that comes with it.”
The petitioners said the law is seen potentially increasing incidents in which they are labeled as communist rebels. They said indigenous peoples and human rights defenders have been murdered even before the law was enacted.
“The indigenous peoples’ assertion of their rights and their consequent opposition to development aggression should never serve as a justification for red-baiting or red-tagging since it is but an exercise of their constitutionally guaranteed rights to self-determination,” they said in the petition.
Citing the Department of Justice’s petition for the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New Peoples’ Army to be judicially declared as terrorists, the group said hundreds of them have already been listed as “reds.”
Interestingly, the list also includes advocates for indigenous peoples.
Filed in 2018, this petition is still pending before a Manila court. Though it initially named over 600 people as respondents, the list is now down to eight alleged leaders, including Jose Maria Sison, who is in exile in the Netherlands.
“The passage of RA 11479 will even potentially exponentially increase the instances of this red-baiting on three grounds: its vague provisions, its disregard for the context of the indigenous peoples, and its giving more power to State forces, most of whom have been at the forefront of the abuses against the indigenous peoples,” the petitioners said.
Moreover, the petitioners said the anti-terrorism law will also place Moro people in “grave insecurity,” claiming that Muslims have long been wrongly generalized as terrorists.
“The labels ‘terrorist’ and ‘insurgents’ have become the catch-all pretext to legitimize attacks on them,” the petitioners said of indigenous and Moro peoples.
“Far from a law that protects, RA 11479 legitimizes the structural violence already perpetuated against them and is repugnant to constitutional values,” they said.
Likewise stipulated in their petition are provisions on surveillance, the designation of individuals and groups as terrorists, and warrantless arrests.
Retired justices Antonio Carpio and Conchita Carpio Morales, four members of the commission that drafted the 1987 Constitution, lawmakers, lawyers, professors, youth leaders, journalists, artists, labor groups, activists have also filed petitions against the law.