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Remigio D. Saladero, Jr., human rights lawyer, Philippines
The following article is from a talk given by Remigio D. Saladero at the University of Hong Kong on 23 April 2009, drawing on his own experiences as a labour lawyer and political detainee to highlight the current use of the legal process in the Philippines to suppress dissent. Further details on his and other similar and related cases in the Philippines can be found at the Asian Human Rights Commission’s Philippines webpage: http://philippines.ahrchk.net.
Last Monday, The Standard, one of the English newspapers here in Hong Kong, carried the following headline: “Lawyers fear for their safety”. According to the news item, the Hong Kong authorities plan a cost-cutting measure to change police officers with security guards in keeping the peace at lower courts. So, lawyers believe that security guards lack the proper and necessary training and dedication in dealing with violent incidents and would not be able to provide the lawyers and magistrates with protection.
This reminds me of what is happening in the Philippines today. Lawyers in our country also fear for their safety. But this fear is based not only on the failure of the Philippine government to provide them with the necessary protection but also because of the unwritten policies of the government to harass, intimidate, jail and even kill lawyers who are representing forces adverse to the interests of the government.
From 2001 to 2008, 22 lawyers have been brutally murdered in the Philippines. Forty-nine lawyers have either been beaten or imprisoned; 41 of them were human rights defenders or public interest lawyers. Unfortunately, the last on the list of the lawyers who were harassed happens to be myself.
It cannot be disputed that lawyers play an indispensable role in the administration of justice. In a civilized society, every person has a right to the due process of law. And this means that a lawyer must represent a person accused of a crime; however, with lawyers being attacked, people are deprived of their right to competent legal representation. In effect they are deprived of the right to due process, because there may be nobody to represent them before the court. An attack on lawyers, especially public interest lawyers or human rights lawyers, makes it difficult for poor people to avail themselves of the right to counsel, to avail themselves of the services of lawyers, and consequently the administration of justice suffers.
I had this experience in my case, when I was in jail. Due to my absence, many of my clients were not able to file their appeals on time. Many were not able to file their court papers on time. Many of them lost their cases. Many of them also were not able to consult me for important legal advice. This is because the police jailed me in Mindoro, an island quite far from Manila, where I am based and where most of my clients are based. Considering that most of my clients are penniless workers, they could not afford to travel to this island to visit me. Some of them became desperate. Some had to borrow money from loan sharks to pay for the services of other lawyers. Others were forced to accept paltry amounts as settlement of their labour cases.
Incidentally, when I was released many of my clients came back to me, but there were many who did not because they had lost confidence in a lawyer who goes to prison ahead of his clients.
Remigio D Saladero Jr.
Well, I could not prevent a warrant of arrest from being issued against me, but then again the government did not follow normal procedure in the filing of criminal cases against me. It made a mockery of the right to due process and of my right to be informed of the charge against me, and of my right to submit counter evidence at the prosecution inquiry before the judge issued the warrant of arrest.
You see, in the Philippines the criminal justice system consists of two stages. We first have the preliminary investigation stage. In this stage, an accused, or rather, the respondent, is provided with a copy of the charge sheet and the evidence supporting the charge, and is given the right to refute the charge. Now, the prosecutor on the basis of the evidence before him determines if there is probable cause, if there is ground to believe that an offence has been committed and that the respondent is probably guilty. If the prosecutor does not find probable cause, the case is dismissed. If the prosecutor finds probable cause, it is transmitted to the judge, and again the judge makes a preliminary evaluation, to see if there is really probable cause, in which case the warrant of arrest is issued. So, only after the determination of the judge should a person be arrested.
In my case, this was not done. The administration made a mockery of the criminal justice system, to ensure that I and my companions—there were 72 of us who were charged—did not get a copy of the charge sheet nor a copy of the evidence record. How was this done? Well, they used erroneous addresses. My address, as I said, is in Metro Manila. But they made it appear that I lived somewhere in a province, hundreds of miles away, so I was not able to receive the evidence made by the complainant against me. This notwithstanding, the prosecutor transmitted the case for preparation of the warrant of arrest. Incidentally, my name as given in the complaint against me was also wrong. There was some difference in the spelling, but still they considered it to be me.
And when the records reached to the judge, he did not perform the necessary evaluation. He accepted all the findings of the prosecutor and issued a warrant of arrest against me.
I was arrested in a Gestapo-like manner. The police ensured that no one would witness the arrest. I was alone in my office doing some work when someone came, pretending to be an indicted, looking for a lawyer, and I said that I was willing to take his case. He said that he was going to get some papers out of his motor vehicle and went out, and when he returned he was accompanied with several burly men in civilian clothes, not having any ID. They turned out to be police officers, and when they were positive that I was the person that they were looking for, they handcuffed me and whisked me to their vehicle, which was also an unmarked vehicle, without any registration number. They took away my laptop, they took away my PC; they took away my case folders, cell phones and other personal belongings. Then they took me to a police camp and they subjected me to what is called “tactical” interrogation.
Incidentally, I later asked the police department for the list of names of those responsible for my arrest, but up to now my request has fallen on deaf ears. I’ll just persist in asking them and maybe the time will come that I’ll file a case in court to compel them to give the names of those policemen. As for damages, well, our government says it is very poor.
Under Philippine law, I was supposed to be represented by a lawyer of my own choice at the interrogation. So I kept on demanding my right to have a lawyer, to be allowed to call my lawyer, but they repeatedly refused. So they subjected me to tactical interrogation for more than four hours and it was only after those four hours that I was allowed to make a call to my lawyer. Why was this so? By that time, the news concerning my abduction was already being flashed on two major TV stations in the Philippines and they were afraid that because the public was already aware of it that something bad might happen, so they allowed me to use the phone to call my lawyer. I spent the next three-and-a-half months in detention.
I was dumped in prison in a province quite far from home, and had to live in a cell with around 65 other detainees. The detention place was maybe ten square metres, and we had to sleep with two persons in the same bed. It was very hard in the morning to take a bath. We had to take baths with other inmates, due to the lack of facilities, and very fast, in about one minute, due to the limit of water. And we had to eat at a budget of seven Philippine Pesos per meal or less.
How did it happen? How did it happen that a lawyer like me could go to jail ahead of his clients? The answer lies in the counterinsurgency program of the Arroyo government. Several months after President Arroyo assumed power, the World Trade incident happened and George Bush made his call for a war on terror. This global campaign eventually redefined the word “terrorist” to refer to anyone opposed to the Bush government’s hegemonic policies. President Arroyo was the first to follow Bush’s war. By aligning herself with the war on terror, her government received strong military backing from the Bush administration. Arroyo labeled all opponents to her regime either terrorists or “destabilizers”. So the critics of the Arroyo administration were made open targets in the violent drive to quash mounting popular opposition.
Instead of declaring formal martial law like President Marcos in 1972, Arroyo adopted a counterinsurgency program that unleashed her own brand of state terrorism. The counterinsurgency program was designed in 2002 to cripple the armed communist movement by 2006. This program trained the guns of the armed forces and the police on the legal, aboveground people’s organizations, in other words, against social activists. The objective was to instill fear in the supporters of these mass organizations, which are critical of the Arroyo regime.
Of course, this counterinsurgency program is not different from other anti-insurgency programs of past administrations, but it added a new, vicious feature. It targeted the leaders of mass organizations and prominent social activists on the left of the political spectrum for assassination, abduction, illegal arrest and torture.
From the time that Mrs. Arroyo assumed power in 2001 up to 2008, more than 900 leaders of mass organizations were killed. In the same period, 201 people were victims of enforced disappearances and 1852 persons were illegally arrested. There are at present a total of 270 political prisoners languishing in various parts of the Philippines. But the armed communist insurgency continues to this day, so something is wrong with this counterinsurgency policy. But then again, Mrs. Arroyo is quite hard headed.
As Arroyo persisted with this policy, the Philippines became the centre of attention of the international community for violating human rights. Several fact-finding missions were formed to investigate these extrajudicial killings, the most prominent of which was the investigation made by Professor Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial killings. And one of his recommendations was that the Arroyo government should not lump together the armed insurgents with the legal mass organizations, and it should make genuine efforts to stop and investigate all these extrajudicial killings.
So for a time the killings dropped a little, but on 17 July 2006 the Arroyo administration added the filing of trumped-up charges against social activists as one of its tactics, and usually non-bailable ones like murder and arson. On that date the administration created the Interagency Legal Action Force, with an initial budget of 50 million Pesos, which is quite a large amount. On paper, the purpose of this force is to investigate, prosecute, monitor and handle cases concerned with national security. However, its unwritten primary objective is to organize the systematic filing of fabricated cases against activists critical of the Arroyo administration. And as I mentioned, the latest of these cases involved me, and my co-respondents.
The main reason for the cases against me was that I was a lawyer for some labour organizations that are critical of the Arroyo government. I am also a lawyer for some alleged members of the New People’s Army, and there were several cases that I handled involving these persons, but in the end not one of these persons were found guilty in the courts. In short, the authorities wanted to get even with me, and also wanted other people to be discouraged that, “You see, your lawyer can be arrested so how much more will happen to you?”
There were actually three related cases filed against us. In the first case, which was for arson and inciting rebellion, there were 27 respondents who supposedly conspired to blow up a cell site owned by the Globe Telephone Corporation. This supposedly happened in Batangas Province, several miles from Metro Manila. In the second case, for multiple acts of murder, the 72 of us were involved. This was supposedly for the murder of three police officers and wounding of three others, because supposedly we ambushed them. In the third case, again for murder, 63 of us were accused of killing one person in an ambush, 63 ambushing one.
In all these cases, the authorities subverted the criminal legal system. How? First, they used wrong addresses for each of us in each of the three different cases. I had a wrong address in the arson case, another wrong address in the multiple murder case, and another wrong one again in the third case. I had three sets of wrong addresses. The same was true for my co-respondents. Second, the prosecutor did not conduct a genuine preliminary investigation. He accepted all the police allegations and transmitted these to the judge for issuance of warrants of arrest without any preliminary investigation as required under Philippine law. And the judge also did the same. He also failed to uphold his duty to conduct an evaluation of the evidence to determine whether there was really probable cause against us before issuing the warrants of arrest.
Anyway, our lawyers filed a motion to quash, challenging the validity of the charges based on technical grounds, especially the lack of preliminary investigation. But the judge to whom our case was assigned sat on it and failed to act on the motion after several months. So what we did was have each of the labour federations whose members were among the accused address a letter to the judge asking him to decide our cases fairly and without delay. This letter was published in the newspapers, and there was even a caricature of the judge as a puppet of the military.
Then the judge was deluged with letters. Every day hundreds of letters poured in, some from Canada, from France. One day he called me from my prison cell. I came to my office and he told me that according to him he was supposed to deny our motion to quash, but because of the public pressure he had decided to withdraw from the case. The case was transferred to another judge, and again the letters started pouring in, but the second judge also sat on our motion.
One day the president of the Integrated Bar Association of the Philippines, an association composed of all lawyers in the archipelago, came to visit me in prison and announced that he was entering his name as a lawyer for me. Strangely enough, about one week after his visit the order came from the judge approving the motion to quash. The case was dismissed, here I am now, and I have no intention of stopping my work.
But the danger still remains. The danger remains not only for me but also for thousands of social activists in the Philippines. There is no showing that the Philippine government has ended the use of these “legal offensives”, in fabricating cases, in undermining the due process of law to keep social activists in jail and immobilized. So the Arroyo administration must be made to stop this practice, must be made to stop its counterinsurgency program, which fails to distinguish between armed rebels and unarmed social activists, must be made to stop the practice of subverting criminal procedure and filing of trumped-up cases against social activists. For this goal to be achieved, international pressure is also necessary.
Posted on 2009-06-23
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