The International People’s Tribunal (IPT) on the war crimes of the US-backed Duterte and Marcos Jr regimes convened on 17 and 18 May in Brussels, with an international panel of jurors listening to testimonies from victims and witnesses, exposing human rights violations and war crimes committed by the Philippine government.
In a 10-page decision signed by an international panel of jurors, including former legal counsel to Nelson Mandela, Prof Lennox Hinds, the tribunal found “a steady rise in cases of abduction and enforced disappearance perpetrated by GRP [Government of the Republic of the Philippines] forces against activists.”
Belgian MP Séverine de Laveleye explained that the jurors had found “substantial and compelling evidence of widespread extrajudicial killings, civilian massacres, enforced disappearances, indiscriminate bombings and other gross violations of international humanitarian law.”
The IPT issued a guilty verdict against Ferdinand Marcos Jr, Rodrigo Duterte, the Government of the Republic of the Philippines and the United States government for war crimes against the Philippine people and violations of International Humanitarian Law. The guilty verdict was announced in Brussels before numerous international observers, who had heard testimonies and statements from victims of war crimes over the past two days.
A similar People’s Tribunal model was used in 2018 to assess the Turkish government’s maltreatment of its Kurdish citizens. It assessed the impact of Turkey’s repression of Kurdish political activism, demonstrations and uprisings within its borders following the collapse of Turkish-Kurdish peace talks in 2016.
In an exclusive interview with MedyaNews, Ariel Casilao, president of the “Toiling Masses” or “Anakpawis” Party of the Philippines, explains that he joined the People’s Tribunal to represent the family of Peace Consultant Randall Echanis, 72, who had led peace negotiations between the Philippine communist movement and the Philippine government, and was murdered on 10 August 2020.
Casilao stated that “The status of the case is still under investigation, which means that no perpetrators have been held accountable and the extrajudicial killings continue.” He revealed that the Toiling Masses Party has documented the extrajudicial killing of 478 members of the organisation so far.
He made clear that these killings were part of the so called “anti-terror operation” which the Philippine government is carrying out with the support of the US and which uses anti-terror laws to suppress the political opposition. Because this law makes no distinction between “armed revolutionary movements” and other political opposition to the government, it is being used to justify the killings of political activists and civilians.
Calling the International People’s Tribunal a “proper and alternative platform for the victims’ families seeking justice”, Casilao emphasised that he hoped the case would be heard “not only by the jurors and the prosecution panel but also by the people witnessing the proceedings of the tribunal”, so that the international pressure against the Philippine government can be increased.
He ended his statement expressing his hope that “the verdict and the outcome of this international tribunal will provide a semblance of justice to the victims’ families in the Philippines”.
Peter Murphy, chairman of the Global Council of the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP), also spoke to MedyaNews during the People’s Tribunal. He explained that the ICHRP was founded in 2013 because of the “need of a higher level of international action against the very brutal regime in the Philippines” and highlighted that under the current regime of Marcos Jr “the repression is worse than ever before.”
By calling US capital “the driving force behind some of the worst things going on in the world today”, he compared the situation of the Philippines to that in the Middle East, saying that the “US regime itself is behind the situation in the Philippines like it is in many other parts of the world”, driven by it’s own “geostrategic interests and investment in the capitalist system”.
Furthermore, Murphy explained the US’s involvement in the Middle East by stating that “In the war in Gaza we can see that the US is the principal weapons supplier to a genocide.”
He noted that they have also been following “the situation of Kurdish people in the terrible conflicts taking place in Syria, in Turkey and in Iraq”, and called the US a “complicated player” in these conflicts, following its own imperial interests rather than seeking the rights of the people in that part of the world.
He made clear that the ICHRP is supporting the rights of the Kurdish people to self-determination and freedom, and ended his statement by calling for the building of “an international coalition to isolate the Philippine government and expose the role of the US in this terrible repression”, and to “change the situation so that the people in the Philippines can act on their own right of self-determination and development”.
