‘Real rights, real people’

Can a human rights advocate work for Rodrigo Duterte?

He can and he did, says Harry Roque. The lawyer bristles at criticism that he turned his back on his advocacy when he left Congress as a party-list representative (the party didn’t drop him, he stresses) to become the mouthpiece of President Duterte.

Yet the issue will keep cropping up as Roque bids for a Senate seat under the party set up by the President’s daughter.

Facing us on “The Chiefs” on One News / Cignal TV, aired Monday night, Roque repeated the administration’s line that there are no state-sanctioned killings of drug personalities and other crime suspects.

As the President’s adviser on human rights, however, Roque said he voiced to Malacañang officials his dismay over the drug-related killings of teenagers last year, starting with high school student Kian Lloyd delos Santos. The President promised Kian’s relatives justice, Roque noted, and the conviction of the accused cops for murder showed that the justice system is working. As Duterte’s spokesman, Roque has already said that the International Criminal Court cannot step in when the institutions of justice, flawed as they may be, are still working in a country. 

Roque believes he has solid credentials on human rights. He still provides legal assistance to relatives of several of the victims in the 2009 Maguindanao massacre. He reminded us that he pushed for the law to protect journalists from violent attacks. He continues to oppose the death penalty and imprisonment for juvenile offenders, although he favors lowering of the age of criminal liability. He supported relatives of transgender Jennifer Laude, who was killed by an American serviceman in 2014 in Olongapo.

But Roque surely understands that his stint with the man who was swept to the presidency on a platform of killing people is making people refer to him as a “former” human rights lawyer.

Roque prefers to focus on the other aspects of human rights that he says he will push for if elected to the Senate: the right to food, water, health care, education, welfare of internally displaced persons – the requirements of human development.

“Human development is part of human rights,” he told us. “I deserve to be known and remembered as a human rights advocate.”

What he’s championing, he said, are “real rights for real people.”

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Such remarks drive critics of the human rights record of the Duterte administration up the wall.

Duterte has been lambasted for saying, in explaining his brutal war on drugs, that human rights can get in the way of human lives. Those who know that drug traffickers fight dirty may understand what he means. But his ideas, when uttered in public, can use more nuanced expression and cannot be reduced to sound bites.

Roque says he disagrees with that presidential statement, and he believes that the war on drugs must be anchored on the right to life. But he explains that Duterte issues such statements when the President resents “being condemned without being heard.”

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Similar interpretations of human rights are in fact quite prevalent especially in our part of the planet. Singapore’s founding leader Lee Kuan Yew believed economic rights took precedence over certain civil liberties. First liberate the people from poverty, keep them safe, give them efficient governance, and then deal with all those other matters in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The success of Singapore has fanned the challenge of certain other governments about the universality of human rights. 

China, the only country where email sent regularly to me by human rights groups is blocked, used to give visiting journalists copies of a booklet on human rights in the country. The booklet comes with a section on the responsibilities that go along with the exercise of those rights.

Human rights advocates fear that “responsibility” can be interpreted differently by the government and the people. They stress that when it comes to the exercise of rights, one must always err on the side of freedom. Yet I also know prominent Filipinos who believe that our country can use more emphasis on the responsible exercise of rights.

National security issues, including extremist violence and migration, are also forcing even free societies to rethink their outlooks on human rights.

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Myanmar freedom fighter Aung San Suu Kyi has fallen from grace in the eyes of human rights advocates for her policies toward the Rohingya Muslim minority in her country.

The United States, even before Donald Trump rose to power, has been accused of “calculated hypocrisy” in its human rights stance, embracing authoritarian regimes as long as they serve America’s strategic interests. Even during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, people were already saying that for Washington, one may be an SOB, but as long as he’s America’s SOB, he’s OK.

Today the gruesome murder of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi illustrates the state of human rights around the world, 70 years since the United Nations General Assembly passed the landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Khashoggi met a macabre, inhuman end inside his native country’s consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. He was tortured and his body later cut up with a saw.

What might Khashoggi have done to deserve such atrocity? Only one explanation keeps cropping up: as a broadcast journalist and columnist for the Washington Post, he had often criticized the kingdom’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Before the murder, the prince had been cultivating an image as a reformist out to modernize his family’s kingdom and stamp out corruption, even if it included his relatives. Suddenly, he’s seen as the brains behind a gruesome murder.

We’re not really sure how widespread such executions are in the kingdom. Certain states or communities in the Middle East and North Africa still impose forms of punishment that are considered barbaric in western democracies.

In Khashoggi’s case, what’s dismaying for rights advocates is the response of the White House – which is to reassure Riyadh that Trump has the Crown Prince’s back.

This has prompted observations that the global human rights movement needs a new state champion. Considering recent developments against terrorism, migration, and yes, even drug trafficking, it’s interesting to see which country would be willing to take this lead.

We might instead see more heads of state talking about “real rights for real people.”