right to equal treatment before the law, to freedom of
The Old Struggle for Human
Rights, New Problems Posed by
Security
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, Manila* by Chief Justice Reynato S. Puno, Supreme
Court, Philippines
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 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
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 BiaknaBato. 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,
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. 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 reenacted
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 peoples
fundamental liberties. In clear and unmistakable language,
the Constitution 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 mankinds 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
counterinsurgency operations against the New Peoples
Army (denounced as terrorists) periodic human rights
violations, 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 illeffects 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 1520 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 bombs but neither can they be preserved by bullets alone.
that may end up in terrorism. Terrorism is a militarypolice problem but its ultimate solution
lies beyond the guns of our armed forces.
And this leads me to the proposition that we need to give
a broader, innovative view on our efforts to protect the Two. In fighting terrorism, let us not overlook the non
human rights of our people which should consider our distinct military aspects of our national security and their impact on
social, economic and political context. Defying the cult of human rights. The scholar Michael Renver hits the bullseye
conformity and comfort, I submit that this view should with the following analysis:
consider the following facts and factors: terrorism is only symptomatic of a far broader set of deep
concerns that have produced a new age of anxiety. Acts of
One. Terrorism is just one means of violating our human
terror and the dangerous reactions to them are like
rights, especially our right to life itself, and should not
exclamation marks in a toxic brew of profound
consume our entire attention. Often, terrorism attracts
socioeconomic, environmental, and political pressures
universal attention because of its cinematic impact the
forces that together create a tumultuous and less stable
shocking violence, the bravado of the villains, the heroism of
world. Among them are endemic poverty, convulsive
the victims rescuers, the sickening loss of lives and property
economic transitions that cause growing inequality and high
and the dominance of the animal in man. Terrorism is terrible
unemployment, international crime, the spread of deadly
enough but the mindless, knee jerk reaction to extirpate the
armaments, largescale population movements, recurring
evil is more discomforting. The quickie solution is to unfurl
natural disasters, ecosystem breakdown, new and resurgent
the flag, sing the national anthem and issue the high pitched
communicable diseases, and rising competition over land
call to arms for the military and the police to use their
and other natural resources, particularly oil. These
weapons of destruction under the theme victory at all cost.
problems without passports are likely to worsen in the
To put constitutional cosmetics to the militarypolice
years ahead. They cannot be resolved by raising military
muscular efforts, lawmakers usually enact laws using
expenditures or dispatching troops. Nor can they be
security of the state to justify the diminution of human rights
contained by sealing borders or maintaining the status quo
by allowing arrests without warrants; surveillance of
in a highly unequal world.
suspects; interception and recording of communications;
seizure or freezing of bank deposits, assets and records of
Today and yesterdays broadsheets bannered the news
suspects. They also redefine terrorism as a crime against
about the stranglehold of poverty in the Philippines. The
humanity and the redefinition is broadly drawn to constrict
World Bank says that about 15M or 19% of Filipinos survive
and shrink further the zone of individual rights. If there is any
on less than $1 a day. Our National Anti Poverty Commission
lesson that we can derive from the history of human rights, it
disputes the figures and claim that only 10.5 M Filipinos live
is none other than these rights cannot be obliterated by
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 dont 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.