THE Palace last week praised the UN as a beacon of hope as the world celebrated United Nations Day, a gesture that seemed duplicitous, given the Aquino administration’s recent moves to dismiss or disregard the supranational body’s findings on its actions here at home.
“Now, more than ever, the significance of United Nations cannot be overemphasized as governments continue to resort to the UN and its various agencies for the promotion of peace, health, and development,” a Palace spokesman said. The fulsome praise follows her colleague’s flippant dismissal earlier this month of a UN agency’s finding that the government violated international human rights law with its illegal, arbitrary and politically motivated detention of former President Gloria Arroyo. In that instance, another spokesman for President Benigno Aquino III, said the finding of the Working Committee on Arbitrary Detention under the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights was “just a group expressing their own opinion.”
Sadly, this was not the first time that President Aquino’s administration has pushed aside the UN.
In September, the administration turned down a request by UN special rapporteurs to visit the country to look into reports of killings and human rights abuses committed against tribal communities or lumad in Mindanao.
A human rights group based in the Philippines had asked the UN special rapporteurs to investigate the killing of lumad leaders Dionel Campos and Juvello Sinzo and lumad teacher Emerito Samarca in Surigao del Sur, but the UN envoys are not allowed to conduct an investigation without an invitation from the government.
While thousands of lumad fled their ancestral homes in fear, this administration said it needed to undertake its own “internal processes” before any international bodies could get involved.
“It is best to leave the investigation to relevant authorities in the Philippines,” a Foreign Affairs spokesman said to justify the government’s rejection of an independent UN probe.
The disastrous consequence of the administration’s refusal to allow UN investigators into the country came home to roost last week, when a village leader led a mob of townsmen and some soldiers in destroying a school run by a private organization and named after an Italian priest who was killed for championing the rights of indigenous people.
Lawmakers from Bayan Muna said the Fr. Fausto Tentorio Memorial School in Kitaotao, Bukidnon, was destroyed by a mob led by the barangay chairman and aided by some soldiers.
The school, run by the Mindanao Interfaith Services Foundation Inc., was named after Italian priest Fausto Tentorio of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions who was killed on church grounds in Arakan, North Cotabato in 2011 by members of the same paramilitary group accused of killing the three lumad leaders in September.
Given this government’s dismal failure to abide by international human rights conventions, its praise of the UN is a mockery of the principles for which it stands. Silence, not lies, would have been the more honest way for this government to mark UN Day.