Last June, I travelled to the Philippines for the International Fair Trial Day. This annual event is an initiative which was born out of a desire to honour the life and work of Turkish lawyer Ebru Timtik, who went on hunger strike to protest against the way she and her colleagues’ fair trial rights had been violated in Turkey in 2020. Ebru sacrificed her life to try and prevent others from suffering similar violations.
Every year since 2021, the event has focused on a different country where fair trial rights have been violated. The aim is to bring attention to everyone, from lawyers to journalists and politicians to academics or members of the public, who suffered from speaking truth to power.
The Philippines was the focus country in 2024 because of serious interference with the independence of judges and lawyers, and systemic issues of arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance and extrajudicial killing. After the conference, the Philippines Edition Event Report was drafted highlighting key messages and takeaways.
In advance of the conference, an international delegation of lawyers known as the ‘Caravana Filipina’ carried out a fact-finding mission which investigated extrajudicial killings and other gross human rights violations against legal professionals in the Philippines between 2016 and 2023. The cases examined by the Caravana relate primarily to lawyers, but also to some judges and prosecutors. It is a joint initiative of 10 different lawyers’ organisations, including the Law Society, from multiple countries. The full report was published last week and can be downloaded here.
We have had recent problems with the persecution of lawyers in England and Wales, including the attacks on immigration lawyers in the summer of 2024 and the frequent criticisms of ‘lefty lawyers’ who are standing up for their clients in unpopular cases. However, these violations which we have faced as lawyers in the UK pale in comparison to the levels of persecution faced by lawyers in many other parts of the world.
The Philippines has long been recognised as one of the worst environments for lawyers, prosecutors, judges and rights defenders in general. For decades, brave individuals have risked their personal safety to provide legal representation in public interest and human rights cases. And they have suffered for it.
In the 15 years from September 2007 to December 2022, 271 cases of work-related attacks on Filipino lawyers and judges were recorded by the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers. 86 lawyers were unlawfully killed. At least 185 forms of attack were used on legal professionals, including attempted killings, threats, intimidation and labelling or vilification.
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