How Filipinos violate human rights every day

My readers know too well that we’ve been banging on the doors of the House of Representatives for the enactment of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) patterned after the United States and so many other Western countries that go into full-blown investigation to find out the causes of airplane mishaps or crashes, and ship, railroad or bus disasters. With the twin sea disasters that struck off Cavite and Mindoro last December, once again the Board of Marine Inquiry (BMI) has been convened jointly by the Philippine Coast Guard and the Maritime Industry Authority (Marina), agencies that could very well be the root cause of these disasters.

But then, Congress has only been nonchalant about the creation of the NTSB for this country, as they just can’t find a reason to prioritize this proposal that the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) and the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP) fully support and endorse. I guess that’s because life is cheap in the Philippines and the only people crying out for respect of human rights are the leftists who march in the streets in support of their fallen comrades.

But like it or not, helping solve maritime or aviation disasters is also helping the victims of tragedies in the hope that we can avoid future mishaps.

So we ask… how many more ships have to sink in order for Congress to enact the NTSB law? How many more airplane mishaps do we need in order for Congress to finally wake up to the reality that we needed such an agency decades ago?

Still on human rights violations, if you didn’t know, human rights violations are not just about killing people. I’ll have you know that Filipinos violate the rights of others almost every day. One is the excessive noise of motorcycle engines, especially those that we call habal-habal which they call a one-man taxi in Bangkok. First of all, we cannot call it a one-man taxi in this country because habal-habals often carry around five to seven passengers. Yes, Virginia, a motorcycle built and designed to carry two passengers are more often than not, overloaded with passengers that the driver often has to look behind someone’s underarm just to see the road ahead. In my book, compromising the safety of their passengers is a grave human rights violation, especially that the drivers don’t wear a helmet!

Yet the authorities cannot seem to stop this practice even if the accident rate from motorcycles as reported in hospitals have skyrocketed to a record high. In order for these puny motorcycles with small displacement engines to gain more power and carry more passengers, the drivers often remove their silencers and in doing so, they have committed a second human rights violation with the excessive noise of their unsilenced motorcycles.

My brother-in-law lives in Busay Hills and we often visit them for a quiet Sunday afternoon. But the word quiet is no longer operative because the noise even by a single motorcycle reverberates throughout the mountainside. I’m an avid motorcycle enthusiast, but I have kept the exhaust pipe of my BMW in its original form so it only growls as I rev the engine, but there is no offensive noise coming out of my pipes. I dare say that there ought to be a law that prohibits motorcycles from running our streets without a silencer.

Well, it turned out that there is such a law pending in Congress. It’s House Bill 7072 authored by presidential son Camarines Sur Rep. Diosdado “Mikey” Arroyo to regulate the noise generated by vehicles in residential areas at night and in the early morning hours. Apparently our congressmen have done enough research on this issue to know that noise pollution can damage one’s hearing. Noisy motorcycles can cause lack of sleep and brings stress to residents, often leading to high-blood pressure, cardiovascular problems, nerve disorders and hearing loss.

I fully support this bill, but I would also like to add that motorcycles in Cebu also have a stiff competition from those highly offensive Discorrals, which many sitios or barrios holding their fiestas always hold. A Discorral is nothing but a disco dance held outdoors, usually in a basketball court. The noise level of those huge speakers is so many decibels high that you could feel the thump-thump sound in your body! Of course the youth love dancing with these sounds. But the poor nursing mothers living a few hundred meters away have trouble keeping their children asleep because of the noise. This is not to mention that the people who have to work the next day wake up haggard because of lack of sleep. It is a human right to sleep without disturbance!

May is the Fiesta Month for Filipinos and noise from the Discorrals would undoubtedly disturb a lot of people in our communities. I hope that Malacañang will prioritize this law because it is time that Filipinos learn to respect the rights of people who need a good night’s sleep!

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