A lifelong human rights defender from Switzerland

Last Dec. 3 (International Solidarity Day with Political Prisoners), human rights defenders and former political detainees marched to Mendiola (now Chino Roces) Bridge, after picketing the Department of Justice. They urged the government to release all of the country’s 449 political prisoners, 154 of them arrested under the Aquino administration.

Come Dec. 10 (International Human Rights Day), contingents will again march to Mendiola. This time they’ll call the government to account for its failure to stop extrajudicial killings and other human rights violations, and to end impunity — as President Aquino publicly promised to do in July 2010.

 How serious is the impunity problem?  Just consider:

 1. On May 29, 2012, the UN Human Rights Council issued its “universal periodic review” of the Philippines’ human-rights performance: 22 member-nations deplored the Aquino government’s “dismal record” in prosecuting violations that happened under its watch and its predecessor’s.

They urged the government to take “decisive measures” to end impunity. The cases recorded then: 76 extrajudicial killings, 49 frustrated EJKs (under the Aquino government only).

2. The following September, the government told the UNHRC that it had taken measures to address the problems raised.  Yet the number of incidents rose to 112 EJKs, and 68 frustrated EJKs.

3. By August 2013 more cases piled up:  152 EJKs, 168 frustrated EJKs, 18 enforced disappearances (as recorded by Karapatan, the human rights alliance recognized by the UNHRC).

Compounding the failure to fulfill his promise in 2010, P-Noy is being castigated on another human rights issue: failing to implement a new law he signed last February, granting recognition and compensation to tens of thousands of martial law victims.

It took Congress 18 years to pass the Human Rights Victims Reparation and Recognition Act of 2013. It provides P10 billion to compensate the victims (the money will be taken from a part of the Marcos ill-gotten wealth recovered by the government).

But the law cannot be implemented because P-Noy either hesitates, or “refuses” (as one of its authors charged in a privilege speech Monday at the House of Representatives), to appoint the members of the Compensation Board mandated to draw up the implementing rules and regulations and administer the compensation. Meantime, many of the prospective beneficiaries have been dying without receiving any compensation.

Thus there’s just ground for the defenders and victims of human rights violations to rail against the P-Noy government, and to solicit and win the sympathy of supporters around the world.

As the international campaign unfolds, four names come to my mind: Alba Viotto of Switzerland, Renee Destribats of France, Gloria Fairclough of Australia, and Teresa Davis of Canada. As a political detainee under the Marcos dictatorship, and the Cory Aquino and Ramos administrations, I cherished the long-standing personal and political interactions with these wonderful women.

Sadly, Alba Viotto is no longer with us. Weeks ago I was informed that Alba, whom I last met in Geneva in 2007, passed away in May at age 88. 

Her demise will surely sadden the hundreds of former political detainees who benefited from Alba’s relentless endeavors to help regain their freedom. Sending modest financial aid, she kept their morale high through her heart-warming letters. In the late 1970s, Alba visited us at the Bicutan Rehabilitation Center in Taguig.

Thanks to Alba’s friend, Carol Sheller, and to Rose Salvador-Palma, widow of a fellow political detainee who passed on to me Sheller’s English translations from French of testimonials to Alba, I’ve learned other aspects of Alba’s superb lifetime dedication to human rights. Here are excerpts from two testimonies:

“There is no word in French for what English speakers and the United Nations refer to as ‘empowerment.’ But if anyone has ever lived the meaning of this word, it is Alba Viotto,” said Stella Jegher, Amnesty International Swiss branch coordinator.  She added:

“Her whole life long she dedicated her competences, her resources and her energy to the cause of people deprived of their rights. Not that she wanted ‘to help victims’ but rather to give the oppressed the means to act as their own agents of change.

“Whether they were students in nursing, Filipino trade union activists, women raped in Rwanda, or workers without a legal status in Switzerland, Alba worked to bring to public light the situations of individuals whose basic rights were denied. She made their voices heard, insisting that their dignity as human beings be respected.”

From Olivier Dufour, head of the department of mental health and psychiatry at Geneva University Hospital, I glimpsed another aspect of Alba’s humanitarian commitment.

Well-known as a psychiatric nurse, Alba mentored generations of students whom she taught that “…work with mental patients meant reaching out to them as people suffering from psychic problems, searching for a meaning to life…”  She urged them “to draw on our professional capacities and personal experiences and take a strong ethical viewpoint in defense of our patients as human beings, against their being excluded or passed over in silence.” 

Alba, said Dufour, “did not hesitate to upset or question what was taken for granted…and insist(ed) on the responsibility of one human being for the wellbeing of another.”

She was, as the mayor of Geneva so aptly said, the “Great Lady of Human Rights.”

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