PAHRA
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
On the December 10 Turn-over of Declassified Martial Law Documents to Civilian Institutions through the Commission on Human Rights
December 11, 2011
Dear Editor
,
PAHRA commends the Commission on Human Rights and the Armed Forces of the Philippines with the initial turn-over of declassified martial law documents as a courageous step towards accountability and healing.
The turn-over is integral to combating impunity as contained in the UN Updated Principles in Combating Impunity, which includes the right to truth. It has two aspects of this right: the first is the individual’s, as well as, the victim’s families and relatives right to know the circumstances and reasons for the victim’s torture, enforced disappearance or extrajudicial killing. The second is the collective aspect, wherein the nation should remember the tragedies that were consequent of the human rights violations. The obligation to preserve documents and other related evidences to the violations arise from the state’s duty.
So is the obligation that public access is facilitated.
We would like afterwards to compare the turned over documents with the 21,000 documented cases preserved by the Task Force Detainees of the Philippines (TFDP) in its own martial law museum named “The Museum of Courage and Resistance”. Incidentally, 6,000 of these documented cases were used to help win the class suit against the Marcos estate in a Hawaiian court.
This turnover, according to the above mentioned UN Principles, would help secure recognition of “parts of the truth as were formerly denied” that “oppressors often denounced as lies as a means of discrediting human rights advocates”. An example of this denial during martial law was the news article: “One-sided press reports scored. No violations of human rights FM” (Bulleting Today, Sunday, Jan. 23, 1977).
Hopefully, the Aquino administration takes the necessary steps to institute broad reforms to ensure non-recurrence of gross human rights violations through accountability and transparency. This can be institutionalized and sustained with the passage of the proposed bill on the Right to Information.
Not without stirrings of expectation evoked by the declassification of the ISAFP file on CHR Chairperson Etta Rosales, we hope that of the more than 20,000 expected documents, records of all other victims of human rights violations, like those involuntarily disappeared, are included.
The December 10 turned-over documents should not only be merely records of martial law events but, more so, be documents of people’s sufferings and struggles, and of disclosure for healing.
Justice and dignity for us all,
Max M. de Mesa
Chairperson, PAHRA