The Old Struggle for Human Rights,

New Problems Posed by Security*

by

Chief Justice Reynato S. Puno

Supreme Court

“Tomorrow begins in the East,” trumpets the motto of this venerable

institution of learning. In his last moments in Bagumbayan, our national hero Jose

Rizal stared at tomorrow in the eye, veered his bullet-riddled body to the right and

fell lifeless on the ground --face turned towards the rising sun in the east.1 From

the cradle to the grave, Rizal consecrated his life to fight for the human rights of

our people.

Today, you will be certified as a walking intellectual. Tomorrow, you will

be looking at our people with a fresh eye. I urge you to use your new eye to

perceive the meaning and nuances of our continuing struggle to protect and push to

new thresholds the human rights of our people.

The wisdom of hindsight informs us that human rights stem from three

bedrock rights: the right to life, the right to human dignity, and the right to

*
Delivered on April 18, 2007 on the occasion of the conferment of the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws
by the University of the East.
1
Zaide and Zaide, “Martyrdom at Bagumbayan” in Jose Rizal: Works and Writings of a Genius, Writer,
Scientist and National Hero (1994).
develop.2 From the right to life springs our right to own property, to health, to

work, to establish a family. From the right to human dignity flows our right to

equal treatment before the law, to freedom of thought, of conscience, of religion, of

opinion, expression, and to be recognized as a person everywhere. From the right

to develop comes the right to education, and to live in an environment that allows

all of our rights to flourish in full.3

There is no human without any right. The caveman and the civilized man

have the same natural rights. Human rights inhere in all of us as human beings, as

beings higher and different from other creatures. Since they are innate to man,

since they are inherent to his being, these rights are inalienable and cannot be taken

away; they are inviolable and cannot be waylaid by any might of man; their

preservation is an obligation shared by the rulers and the ruled alike.

Our history tells us that in this small patch of the earth, our forefathers

pioneered in planting the seeds of human rights when it was far from being the fad

and fashion of the day. On May 31, 1897, they established a republican

government in Biak-na-Bato. It had a Constitution advance on political and civil

rights. With serendipity, its authors Felix Ferrer and Isabelo Artacho embedded in

it four articles which guaranteed freedom of the press, the right of association,

2
Diokno, J. A Nation for Our Children (1987), pp. 4-5.
3
Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
freedom of religion, and freedom from deprivation of property or domicile

except by virtue of judgment passed by a competent court of authority. They

entrenched these radical ideals in 1898 when Aguinaldo established a

revolutionary government and adopted the Malolos Constitution.

Then came our war against the United States. American President McKinley

sent the First Philippine Commission headed by Jacob Gould Schurman to assess

the Philippine situation. On February 2, 1900, the commission reported to the

President that the Filipino wanted above all a “guarantee of those fundamental

human rights which Americans hold to be the natural and inalienable

birthright of the individual but which under Spanish domination in the

Philippines had been shamefully invaded and ruthlessly trampled upon.”

(emphasis supplied) In response to this, President McKinley, in his Instruction of

April 7, 1990 to the Second Philippine Commission, provided an authorization and

guide for the establishment of a civil government in the Philippines stated that

“(u)pon every division and branch of the government of the Philippines. . . must be

imposed these inviolable rules…” The “inviolable rules” included, among

others, that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without

due process of law.

 The “inviolable rules” of the Instruction were re-enacted almost exactly in

the Philippine Bill of 1902, in the Philippine Autonomy Act of 1916 or the Jones

Law, and in the 1935 Constitution.

The 1935 Bill of Rights was carried into the 1973 Constitution with a

few changes, and finally in the 1987 Constitution. As an aftermath of the martial

law regime of the Marcos government, the 1987 Constitution, enshrined a Bill of

Rights which more jealously safeguards the people’s fundamental liberties. In

clear and unmistakable language, the Constitutional proclaimed as a state policy

that “(t)he state values the dignity of very human person and guarantees full

respect for human rights.” In addition, it has a separate Article on Social Justice

and Human Rights, under which, the Commission on Human Rights was created.

The horrors of the World Wars warn us that the protection of human rights

is a duty we owe to generations to come. In 1945, the peoples of the United

Nations (UN), declared in the Preamble of the UN Charter that their primary end

was the reaffirmation of “faith in the fundamental human rights, in the dignity and

worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations

large and small,” in order “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of

war.”
 The promotion of human rights is also the indispensable predicate of

peace and progress. For this reason, on December 10, 1948, the United Nations

adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Its two implementing

covenants are the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. These instruments

not only denounced nazism and fascism, but also recognized that the “security of

individual rights, like the security of national rights, was a necessary requisite to

a peaceful and stable world order.”

The interesting question is what has happened to human rights in this

new millennium? The end of the Cold War ended the bipolar world starring the

West led by the United States and the East led by Russia. The end result of that

clash of civilization is the emergence of a unipolar world dominated by democracy

as the political ideology and the triumph of capitalism as the bible of economics.

With communism out in the cold, the world awaited with bated breath the dawn of

universal peace and order. But when peace appeared to be within mankind’s grasp,

9/11 shattered to smithereens its illusion. 9/11 gave birth to new realities on

ground with grave repercussions on the human rights situation in the world,

especially the most vulnerable sector, the poor who are many, the many yet the

most impotent.
 On the universal level, 9/11 altered the face of international law. As the

worst victim of terrorism, the United States led the fight to excise and exorcise

terrorism from the face of the earth. It pursued a strategy characterized by a

bruising aggressiveness that raised the eyebrows of legal observers. The leader

country of democracy did not wait for the United Nations to act but

immediately sought to search and destroy terrorists withersoever they may be

found. In less polite parlance, the search and destroy strategy gave little respect

to the sovereignty of states and violated their traditional borders. The

strategy which is keyed on military stealth and might had trampling effects on the

basic liberties of suspected terrorists for laws are silent when the guns of war do

the talking. The war on terrorism has inevitable spilled over effects on human

rights all over the world, especially in countries suspected as being used as havens

of terrorists. One visible result of the scramble to end terrorism is to take legal

shortcuts and legal shortcuts always shrink the scope of human rights.

These shortcuts have scarred the landscape of rights in the Philippines.

In March 2006, Amnesty International issued a public statement expressing grave

concern over reports of an ongoing pattern of political killings of members of legal

leftist organizations in various provinces in the country. It also stated that in the

wider context of continuing nationwide counter-insurgency operations against the

New People’s Army (denounced as terrorists) periodic human rights violation,

including arbitrary detentions, extrajudicial executions and torture, continue to be

reported. Aside from them, community activists, church workers, lawyers,

journalists and others perceived as sympathetic to the communist movement

suffered violation of their human rights. Not to be outdone, the NPAs are also

reported to have lawlessly retaliated against their opponents.

The escalation of extra judicial killings in the Philippines has attracted the

harsh eye of advocates of human rights. The UN Commission on Rights has sent

Prof. Alston to look at the Philippine human rights situation. Some members of

the International Parliamentary Union are in town for the same purpose. Their

initial findings are not complementing to our Constitutional commitment to protect

human rights.

As young graduates, you may be asking yourself the relevance of these

ongoing violations of human rights to your life, especially as you embark on

your journey to improve the economic aspects of your life. I submit that the fight

against terrorism and the battle to preserve human rights have high impact on the

right of young people to live with dignity. One of its ill-effects is the massive

displacement of young people in areas where the fight against terrorism tramples

on human rights. These young people are compelled to migrate to seek greener

pastures in hostile environments and, worse where they find their human rights
subjected to new abuses with near impunity. Figures show that this problem of

displacement will get worse in the coming years because of the galloping growth

of the youth population. The United Nations predict that some 138 countries will

have growing “youth bulge”; its calamitous consequence is that youth

unemployment will skyrocket to record levels with the highest rate in the Middle

East and North Africa. The UN findings further reveal that at least 60 million

people aged 15-20 will not be able to find work and twice as many, about 130M,

cannot lift their families out of poverty. It will not take a prophet to predict that

countries that cannot give decent life to their young people will serve as

incubators of extremism that may end up in terrorism.

And this leads me to the proposition that we need to give a broader,

innovative view on our efforts to protect the human rights of our people which

should consider our distinct social, economic and political context. Defying the

cult of comformity and comfort, I submit that this view should consider the

following facts and factors:

One. Terrorism is just one means of violating our human rights, especially

our right to life itself, and should not consume our entire attention. Often,

terrorism attracts universal attention because of its cinematic impact – the shocking

violence, the bravado of the villains, the heroism of the victims’ rescuers, the
sickening loss of lives and property and the dominance of the animal in man.

Terrorism is terrible enough but the mindless, knee jerk reaction to extirpate the

evil is more discomforting. The quickie solution is to unfurl the flag, sing the

national anthem and issue the high pitched call to arms for the military and the

police to use their weapons of destruction under the theme victory at all cost. To

put constitutional cosmetics to the military-police muscular efforts, lawmakers

usually enact laws using security of the state to justify the dimunition of human

rights by allowing arrests without warrants; surveillance of suspects; interception

and recording of communications; seizure or freezing of bank deposits, assets and

records of suspects. They also redefine terrorism as a crime against humanity and

the redefinition is broadly drawn to constrict and shrink further the zone of

individual rights. If there is any lesson that we can derive from the history of

human rights, it is none other than these rights cannot be obliterated by

bombs but neither can they be preserved by bullets alone. Terrorism is a

military-police problem but its ultimate solution lies beyond the guns of our armed

forces.

Two. In fighting terrorism, let us not overlook the non-military aspects

of our national security and their impact on human rights. The scholar Michael

Renver hits the bulleye with the following analysis:

 xxx terrorism is only symptomatic of a far broader set of deep
concerns that have produced a new age of anxiety. Acts of terror and
the dangerous reactions to them are like exclamation marks in a toxic
brew of profound socioeconomic, environmental, and political
pressures forces that together create a tumultuous and less stable
world. Among them are endemic poverty, convulsive economic
transitions that cause growing inequality and high unemployment,
international crime, the spread of deadly armaments, large-scale
population movements, recurring natural disasters, ecosystem
breakdown, new and resurgent communicable diseases, and rising
competition over land and other natural resources, particularly oil.
These “problems without passports” are likely to worsen in the years
ahead. xxx They cannot be resolved by raising military expenditures
or dispatching troops. Nor can they be contained by sealing borders
or maintaining the status quo in a highly unequal world.

Today and yesterday’s broadsheets bannered the news about the

stranglehold of poverty in the Philippines. The World Bank says that about 15M

or 19% of Filipinos survive on less than $1 a day. Our National Anti Poverty

Commission disputes the figures and claim that only 10.5 M Filipinos live on $1 a

day. To the unsophisticated in the esoterics of economics, this is a distinction

without difference for the cruel fact is that poverty stalks this land of plenty and

hunger is still the best food seasoning of its people. In poor countries, it is poverty

that truly terrorizes people for they are terrorized by the thought that they will die

because of empty stomachs and not that they will lose their lives due to some

invisible suicide bombers. In poor countries, it is also poverty that renders the

poor vulnerable to violation of their rights, for the poor will not vindicate their

rights in a justice system that moves in slow motion and whose wheels have to be
greased with money. And would any dare to doubt, that our national security and

our human rights are more threatened by the fear that we face an environmental

collapse if we do not take immediate steps to save our seas and our forests from

the despoliation to satisfy the economic greed of the few. Again, the realities may

be uncomfortable but let the statistics talk and they tell us that in year 2000 for

example, 300,000 people all over the world died due to violence in armed conflicts

but as many people die each and every month because of contaminated water or

lack of adequate sanitation.

Three. The threats to our national security and human rights will be

aggravated if we have a state, weakened internally by a government hobbled by

corruption, struggling with credibility, battling the endless insurgence of the left

and the right; and, by a state weakened externally by pressure exerted by creditor

countries, by countries where our trade comes from, by countries that supply our

military and police armaments. A weak state cannot fully protect the rights of

its citizens within its borders just as a state without economic independence

cannot protect the rights of its citizens who are abroad from the exploitation

of more powerful countries.

Fourth and lastly, the business of safeguarding our national security, the

obligation of protecting human rights is a burden shared by all of us. It is not

only the military that should tackle our problem of security for it is our security

that is at stake, not their security. Security interest is a collective interest where

everybody has a significant stake. In the same vein, the rich and the powerful

should not consider the protection of the rights of the poor and the powerless

as peripheral problems just because for the moment their own rights are

unthreatened. Sooner or later, they will find that they who default in

protecting the rights of the many will end up without rights like the many.

The apathy of those who can make a difference is the reason why violations of

human rights continue to prosper. The worst enemy of human rights is not

its non believers but the fence sitters who will not lift a finger despite their

violations. “If we have learned anything from September 11” wrote New York

Times, columnist Thomas Friedman, “it is that if you don’t visit a bad

neighborhood, it will visit you.”

Our work of protecting human rights is not yet finished. With the

incursions and threats of incursion to our human rights at this crucial moment in

our history, the clarion call to each one of us is to consecrate our lives to the great

cause of upholding our human rights. When Rizal turned his face towards the

rising sun, he saw hope in a heroic people carrying on the fight. Let us not allow

the shadow of ignorance, indifference or indolence eclipse this hope so that we

may continue to see a tomorrow begin in the East.

Thank you and again, congratulations.