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Resurrected Anti-Terrorism Bill threatens human rights in exchange for aid
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February
3, 2004 There is no excuse for
the employment of violence to deliver a political message. The Alliance of
Progressive Labor (APL), together with AKBAYAN, stands in resolute
opposition to any such acts that harm innocent civilians and
non-combatants. APL and
AKBAYAN believe that the power of ideas far outlives the damage and horror
that bullets and bombs can inflict on people.
But the ideas embodied
in House Bill 5923 are as pungent and detestable as any weapon of
destruction. The proposed
bill, up for plenary debates at the House of Representatives aims to stem
what it calls the threat of terrorism as evidenced by the spate of
admittedly horrendous attacks on the public in recent years.
But this legislation is riddled with loopholes prone to abuse and
misinterpretation. First, it vaguely
describes terrorism to include any act that is “threatening to cause
serious interference with or actually causing disruption of a public
transport or utility or an essential service, facility, or system, whether
public or private, except in the furtherance of a legitimate protest,
grievance or advocacy.” But who defines what
“a legitimate protest” is? If
the National Labor Relations Council deems a strike as illegal, would this
mean that a union which chooses to express its grievances fall prey to
that onerous provision of the ATB? Would
workers calling for decent wages and humane working conditions then be
labeled as terrorists for merely expressing their basic human right? The boundaries set by
HB 5923 for what constitutes the commission of terrorism is dangerously
intruding into the legitimate rights of the broad masses to express
themselves. All it would take
is an outsider to instigate panic an chaos in
an assembly and it would be easy for the police to brand protestors as
terrorists for “creating a common danger, terror, panic, or chaos to the
public or a segment thereof.” Naturally
in the absence of real targets, it would not be impossible for police and
military to employ the ATB in its current form against progressive forces
like APL and AKBAYAN which operates within the boundaries of the law.
This is unacceptable. The ATB is a long-dead
measure now being resurrected at the expense of more important bills such
as HB 4535 which indemnifies human rights violations victims of the Marcos
Regime. The proposed measure
is bound to take so much out of the legislature’s precious time which is
better spent on other pressing matters. The fact that the ATB
is a requirement for the flow of more The ATB would qualify
the The assurance of
security from a reformed and reliable police force is what the government
should be going after. It
should go after poverty, the real enemy of democracy and the real source
of resentment and rebellion and ultimately the breeding ground of
terrorists. The ATB must be opposed
and junked, not only as it infringes on human rights and workers’ rights
in particular but also because it declares a state policy against an enemy
which it does not even know, much less understand.
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Alliance of
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