A Summit on ‘Salvagings’ and Abductions

A pro-active Supreme Court leads a conference on extrajudicial killings
A Summit on ‘Salvagings’ and Abductions
By Jose Bimbo F. Santos

NO MORE than 10 percent of the 70 cases of journalists killed in the line of duty since 1986 have resulted in a conviction.
Out of the 33 cases of journalists killed in the line of duty since 2001, only those of Marlene Esperat and Edgar Damalerio have been successfully prosecuted.
And while there were seven convictions among the 70 cases, no mastermind has ever been thrown in jail.
When one looks at the stories behind the numbers in the cases of Filipino journalists killed, the picture decidedly looks grim. It gets even worse, however, when one takes into account the larger picture.
For instance:
From two journalists killed in the line of duty in 2002, the number spiked to seven in 2003, then to eight in 2004, tapering a bit to seven in 2005, and six in 2006, which is still higher than in 2002.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) today ranks the Philippines as the fifth deadliest country for journalists. War-torn Iraq was ranked the deadliest with 92 journalists killed since 2003. In 2005 and 2006, Reporters Without Borders gave the Philippines the no. 2 position in the list of countries that are most dangerous for journalists.
Releasing a list of 240 journalists killed in Asia, Freedom Forum, a US-based press freedom advocate group, identified 52 of those slain as Filipinos. CPJ has also ranked the Philippines as the country with the worst record of journalist killings in Asia.

Unprecedented step
In the days of martial rule, such killings were called “salvaging.” It was a misnomer but people knew what was meant: death done with extreme brutality against persons suspected of being enemies of the state. The killings were done outside the judicial process.
The practice persisted even after the so-called restoration of democracy, worsening during the Arroyo administration. Now, even the Supreme Court (SC) has noticed the rising incidence of extrajudicial killings.
On July 16-17, the high court held the National Consultative Summit on Extrajudicial Killings and Enforced Disappearances. Welcomed by many sectors, the summit forced the government to pay attention to a problem that has been shrugged off by the authorities.
Media, in particular, lauded the event.
“The Supreme Court-organized ‘national consultative summit’ on extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances passed into history the other day. We expect the nation to feel its impact, even to appreciate its historic import, in the coming months,” said the July 19 editorial of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
Chief Justice Reynato Puno, in his keynote address in the conference, did not mince words as he said,  “If there are compelling reasons for this summit, one of them is to prevent losing eye contact with these killings and disappearances, revive our righteous indignation, and spur our united search for the elusive solution to this festering problem.”

Band-aid solutions
To be sure, the Arroyo government has taken some steps to give the impression that it was not exactly blind to the murder of journalists. The Philippine National Police’s Task Force Usig was formed on May 12, 2006, taking over Task Force Newsmen which was created previously. The two bodies, however, have not done much to solve the killings.
Some local government officials have thought of ways to prevent the killings. Manila Mayor Alfredo Lim has proposed an ordinance prohibiting more than one rider on a motorcycle. This is in response to the observation that journalists and activists are usually gunned down by persons riding in tandem on motorcycles.
Bayani Fernando, chair of the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA), also proposed a law requiring motorcycle owners to put their license plate numbers on their helmets. The numbers must be large enough to be seen 25 meters away. Fernando’s policy was, however, not implemented as the MMDA said that the measure needed further study.
“The idea is just so absurd, it looks funny. But no one’s laughing,” a writer at the news and forum website motorcy-clephilippines.com wrote.

The summit
And so, the idea of a conference.
“(The Summit) is envisioned to…provide a broad lens, a synoptic perspective on our problem of extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances,” Puno said.
The first day of the summit presented a panoramic view of the problem of extrajudicial killings and enforced disap-pearances as 23 speakers from various sectors delivered a 15-minute presentation to the summit.
Human rights group Karapatan (Alliance for the Advancement of Peoples’ Rights) has documented 869 cases of extrajudicial killings and 93 enforced disappearances as of May 2007.
The Commission on Human Rights listed 403 such cases while Task Force Usig counted 115.
Among journalists, Joey Estriber, a radio broadcaster in Aurora, is the single case reported of a missing journalist. Estriber, who had a program in dzJO and was a known critic of illegal logging, was abducted on March 3, 2006 and has never been seen since.
The number of journalists killed seems small when compared to those of activists, but Luis V. Teodoro, deputy director of the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility, who spoke about media killings in the summit, said the statistics are significant since such a rate of killings usually occurs only in countries that are at war.
“Only in areas of conflict and failing states are journalists killed on the same scale as in a country whose press was once referred to as the freest in Asia,” Teodoro said.
“As used to violence and death as most Filipinos are, some if not most of them are indifferent to the killing of journalists. And yet these killings strike at the very heart of the constitutional guarantee of press freedom and free expression—rights the charter protects precisely because they’re crucial to the realization and survival of any democracy,” he said.

New crime
On the summit’s second day, July 17, where 12 groups each presided over by a justice of the SC came up with recom-mendations, the group of Senior Associate Justice Leonardo Quisumbing recommended a new crime classification where the offended party is a journalist, judge, or activist who is killed or kidnapped in the performance of his duties.
There were similar sug-gestions in the past. In 1996, a bill was proposed by former congressman Raul Daza titled, “An Act Making the Crime of Murder Against Members of the Press who are Killed in the Line of Duty Punishable by the Maximum Penalty of Death (House Bill 5747).”
In the same year, Rep. Roberto Guanzon and then Sen. Orlando Mercado authored HB 6276 (Media Benefits Act of 1996) and Senate Bill 1445 (Media Protection and Benefits Act of 1996), respectively, providing a number of benefits for journalists like health, accident, or death insurance, an educational plan for children of journalists, an ownership option, discounted fares and accommodations, security of tenure, and access to public records. Guanzon’s bill also provided for affordable housing, sabbatical privileges, and immunity from arrest.
At that time, however, journalists were not keen about the idea of setting themselves apart from ordinary citizens. In a Senate hearing for Mercado’s bill that was called by the Senate Public Infor-mation Committee, Philippine Press Institute (PPI)  president and Malaya publisher Amado Macasaet, opposed the bill, saying that it would only create a “conflict of interest” and that existing labor laws were already enough.
Both Guanzon and Mercado had proposed in their bills the elevation of jour-nalists to “persons in authority” or “agents of persons in authority,” explaining that to do so would elevate crimes committed against them to a higher level.
“The duties of responsible jour-nalists oftentimes mean going against authority. So there would be a conflict of interest if journa-lists are designated ‘persons in autho-rity,’” Carolina Malay, then head of the Journalism Department of the University of the Philippine College of Mass Communication, told the Philippine Journalism Review.
Jose Pavia, executive director of the PPI and publisher of the community paper Mabuhay, expressed the same sentiment.
“Any killing of anyone is abhorrent. We don’t need special protection other than what the government provides for its citizens,” Pavia said, referring to the proposal in the summit.
He added, “If there is impunity, no matter what classification, we will get eliminated. All we need is consistent implementation of the law.”

‘Tree of tyranny’
Aside from the recom-mendation to make it a special crime to kill journalists, there were dozens of other suggestions in the summit. Among them was a proposal for a law that would give an accurate legal definition for extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances, the allocation of a bigger budget for the witness protection program (WPP) of the Department of Justice, the granting to other non-government organizations of the power to have their own WPPs, and the establishment of sanctuaries for victims of threats and witnesses to extrajudicial killings.
“It hammers home the point that there is impunity and that this has to be really addressed,” Pavia said.
Puno concluded the summit with the hope that “under the sunlight of publicity, the tree of tyranny will never grow.”

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