No phone signal: A violation of human rights

First off, the University of the Visayas will have a Holy Mass at 5 p.m. this Saturday, January 12, at the Inday Pining Building for the Opening Salvo of the Centennial Celebration of The Freeman. The celebration will be held at the UV Quadrangle. For me – I have been writing in The Freeman since August 4, 1987 – it is a proud moment in the sense that there are only three newspapers in the Philippines that have reached a hundred years. These three newspapers are the Manila Bulletin, Manila Times and The FREEMAN.

Kudos to The Freeman and Sir Jose “Dodong” Gullas for keeping the paper open to inform Cebuanos on national, local and international news. Of course, I’d like to confess that when I joined The Freeman following invitation from the late editor then publisher Juanito Jabat, I had no knowledge on journalism. But he told me that my boss, the late Philippine Star publisher, Sir Maximo Soliven, too admitted that he too didn’t study journalism. But Soliven, at the peak of his life, was dubbed as the “Dean of Journalists” in the Philippines. Now, I am exhorting all Cebuanos to join in The FREEMAN’s celebration of its Centennial Year because it is a historic time for Cebu, which we all know has always been a player in Philippine history!

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The National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) announced that the Philippine National Police (PNP) suggestion for a signal shutdown during the Sinulog Festival is good as approved. Why did the PNP make this sugges-tion and why does the NTC agree? I say that this is against our human rights, our freedom of expression.

Remember the suggestions for all motorcycle users not to use a helmet, especially full-faced helmets, so as to prevent motorcycle assassins from using a motorcycle as a getaway vehicle? Well, a full-face helmet gives a motorcycle rider more safety than a helmet that only covers the head. But these suggestions to stop motorists from using a helmet, full-faced or not, was dropped simply because the government has decided that all motorcycle users are potential assassins! You do not do this to our people.

So I suggest that the NTC take a good look at its decision because at the end of the day, there may be a million of revellers enjoying the Sinulog Festival, but millions more of Filipinos who will not see the Sinulog are prevented from calling their relatives or friends because the PNP believes that people with cellphones are potential terrorists. If you ask me, it is high time for the human rights advocates to file a case in the Supreme Court (SC).

In case you didn’t know freedom of expression is a fundamental human right. It also underpins most other rights and allows them to flourish. The right to speak your mind freely on important issues in society, access in-formation and hold the powers that be to account, plays a vital role in the healthy development process of any society and preventing people from communicating with each other is a way of curtailing freedom of expression.

So you may ask, “Why is access to freedom of expression important?”

The lack of access to freedom of expression is a problem that particularly affects the already marginalised – that is, minorities facing discrimination both in developed and developing countries. But more importantly, what if there is an earthquake or a fire that hits your locality, how can your family contact you when you cannot use your cellphones? We Filipinos even get mad when Globe Telecom or Smart Telephone cellsites get blocked, all the more that the whole of Cebu and parts of Bohol are silenced.

I recall that in Metro Manila during the Black Nazarene procession cellsites around are shutdown. But then this does not happen in the entire City of Manila or Metro Manila for that matter. So the NTC should not shutdown the signal in Mandaue or Talisay, or even Bohol. It is just too much. Let’s face it, before the invention of cellphones, we already had the Sinulog Festival and there were a lot of snatchings that happened during this festival. So even if the NTC shuts down the entire Cebu and Bohol, snatchers will still ply their nefarious trade! So let’s stop this nonesense! Signal shutdown means violation of our human rights!

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