UPDATED: State of press freedomAttacks and threats in 2012
Worrisome
The culture of impunity in the cases of media killing is clearly encouraging continuing violence against journalists and media workers in the Philippines. The number of cases of media harassment has also remained high.
Six journalists/media workers were physically assaulted in 2012. These incidents include the case of The Daily Tribune reporter Fernan Angeles. Angeles was covering the Malacañang beat at the time of the incident. The alleged motive was his reporting on the illegal drug trade in Pasig and nearby provinces.
Unidentified men mauled and shot Angeles near his home in Balatiw, Pasig City last March 11. A case has been filed against some suspects at the Pasig RTC.
Most of the journalists and media workers killed or assaulted in the Philippines have been from the provincial press. But the Angeles shooting incident was the second work-related case in Metro Manila during Aquino Presidency. The first case in the capital was that of broadcast journalist Marlina “Len” Flores Sumera who was shot and killed in Malabon, a municipality of Metro Manila, March 2011.
Even the victims’ kin have been threatened for actively seeking justice. In October, unidentified men tried to locate the mother of an Ampatuan Massacre victim. Earlier this year, the media also received reports of an assassination plot on the widow of broadcaster Dennis Cuesta.
Paper victories
There were some “victories” this year. But these were paper victories.
A Makati court convicted the gunman in the March 2009 shooting of former chief of reporters and anchor for dxCC-Radio Mindanao Network (RMN) Nilo Labares. However, gunman Bermardo Aguilar had jumped bail and is allegedly freely roaming.
Last June 2012, Branch 134 of the Makati RTC sentenced Aguilar to six years and one day to 12 years and one day imprisonment. The court also ordered Aguilar to pay Labares Php 255, 006 (approximately USD6, 061) in actual damages and Php 20, 000 (Approximately USD 475) in temperate damages.
Another “victory” was the 2011 declaration released in 2012 by the United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) that the Philippine libel law is incompatible with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The UNHRC said the penalty of imprisonment for libel in the Philippines is “excessive”. But the Philippine government nevertheless passed a Cybercrime Prevention law that strengthens the use of criminal libel against free expression by raising the penalties for libel committed online from six months to four years to four years to 10.
Government officials who had filed libel charges under the Revised Penal Code against provincial journalists were apparently as unconcerned with—or ignorant of—the UNHRC declaration.
And yet the declaration was the most significant development in the Philippine campaign to decriminalize libel. The UNHRC was responding to broadcaster Alexander “Lex” Adonis’s petition demanding compensation for the two years he spent in prison for his conviction in absentia in a libel complaint filed by then Davao City 1st District and House Speaker Prospero Nograles.
Nograles filed libel complaints against Adonis, then Bombo Radyo station manager Dan Vicente, and the Manila-based tabloid Abante Tonite for publishing reports that Nograles had run naked from a hotel room after the husband of his alleged mistress caught them in bed.
Hostility to press freedom
The by now apparent lack of political will to stop the killings and to enhance free expression—in fact the hostility of the Aquino administration to press freedom– has preserved the culture of impunity and perhaps even strengthened it.
In 2010, press freedom advocacy groups and journalists’ associations welcomed the Aquino presidency in the hope that his administration would implement several suggestions on speeding up the investigation of the killings and the prosecution of the killers. They also held him to his campaign promise to support a Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. Two years have passed since then with neither the suggestions being implemented, nor an FOI Act that would enhance rather than restrict access to government-held information in place.
