THE main groups of people contrive to make human rights violations a given fact of life in this country. First are individual (thieves, rapists, murderers, etc.) and organized (drug lords, human traffickers, etc.) criminal elements. Second are moderate Rightists (main opposition parties), extreme Leftists (CPP-NPA and fronts) and extreme Rightists (Islamic Jihadists). Third is the government.
It is, therefore, not fair for the UN and EP (European Parliament) to sanction us for what they claim is a “rapidly deteriorating human rights situation” presuming that this is caused solely and directly by the government. It is not fair that their claim of what would be, if true, a deplorable situation is not backed by the hard evidence of professionally documented facts and figures.
The UN’s and EP’s presumptions of government accountability are based mainly on the unsubstantiated claims of Maria Ressa, Senator Leila de Lima and Vice President Leni Robredo. Meanwhile, the country’s CHR (Commission on Human Rights) merely orchestrates the chorus of complaints to the UN and EP but has yet to do its duty of documenting, for instance, that group’s shout to the UN of 27,000 extra-judicial deaths.
But even granting that the rapidly deteriorating human rights situation is solely and directly caused by the government, it still does not give the UN and EP the right to interfere in the affairs of a sovereign state. A government that violates human rights is a problem of its sovereign people who must wake up and unite to solve it.
A self-respecting politically mature people must lead the charge against a government that they, not foreigners, perceive is a flagrant violator of their human rights. They don’t deserve a better government if all they do is complain and cry for a foreign entity to intervene in their affairs. Concerned foreign allies can help wake people up and grow them into maturity but they have no business stunting our political growth by doing our job for us.
That’s the rub. We are not a politically mature people. We lag behind other nations in development because we have yet to live and act as one nation. And we do not live and act as one because we either do not participate actively in the national discourse or participate only from preconceived political and emotionally charged positions.
No amount of foreign intervention will help us grow into a politically mature people, intellectually and morally capable of solving our own problems. The way towards political maturity is to work for a common understanding of our shared reality, something we can get only by conversing with an open mind or with a mind that truly searches for a shared solution of a commonly understood reality.