Incoherent

Cheers and Jeers to GMA-7’s Case Unclosed June 4 episode, “Danyos”, which looked into how the government has failed to indemnify the victims of human rights violations during the Marcos regime.

Cheers for selecting a topic that, despite its significance, has been relegated to the background in the discussion of public issues. The issue of compensation for human rights victims has been discussed in the press sporadically if at all. The last time the topic of compensation for Martial Law victims was in the news columns was in 2008, when the US Supreme Court dismissed the claims of some 10,000 human rights victims to Marcos’s $35 billion account in Merryl Lynch and Co. Although the issue of ill-gotten wealth did appear again more recently, it was mentioned only in relation to Imelda’s P15 billion jewelry collection.

The compensation for human rights victims is worth noting, particularly because the sufficiency of the compensation package and the speed of its granting are indicators of the human rights situation in a country. It was mentioned in “Danyos” that the victims have been waiting for almost two decades for their compensation, which is duly theirs in the first place. After all, the state is morally obliged to immediately grant recompense for the victims of human rights abuses, as provided for by several measures, including Senate Bill 1877, the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (CARHRIHL), and Article 13, Section 18 of the 1987 Constitution.

But while “Danyos” emphasized the importance of compensation for the victims of human rights violations, and the failure of government to recognize this through immediate implementation and legislation, the episode was not as successful in explaining comprehensively and coherently the reasons for this failure. There was no framework of analysis to help the audience understand why and how the government has failed to provide the victims of human rights abuses their due, and has even prevented them from getting it, and to make sense of the seemingly chaotic and arbitrary events that have kept the victims waiting for more than twenty years.

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