Lawyers Weekly report on a terrifying situation for lawyers in the Philippines at the moment
More lawyers have been killed in the five years since Philippines’ president Rodrigo Duterte took office than under any other government, prompting the Australian Bar Association and 30 other international legal bodies to call on the administration to urgently investigate the murders and put in place adequate safeguards.
Recent data has found that of the 110 lawyers killed in the Philippines since 1972, 61 were killed after Rodrigo Duterte took office in 2016.
Many were tied to the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers (NUPL) – which represents leftist activism as well as victims of human rights violations – and other lawyers connected to human rights law.
In addition to targeting lawyers who represent victims of human rights, the killings are also the result of Mr Duterte’s “war on drugs”. Since taking office, over 12,000 Filipinos have been killed, with at least 2,555 carried out by police. Human Rights Watch said the “instigated and incited” killings could be a “crime against humanity”.
According to NUPL and The Free Legal Assistance Group (FLAG) – which both keep track of the killings – almost all are work-related. A further 12 were attributed to personal motives and another 15 did not have a record of motive. Between 2016 and 2019, 54 jurists were also attacked with only eight surviving the attempted killings.
In 2018, gunmen shot dead Benjamin Ramos in Negros Occidental, a province in the central Philippines that has seen an uptick of violence directed at plantation labour organisers, peasant groups and rights defenders. In March 2021, masked men with a screwdriver stabbed Angela Karlo Guillen, the NUPL’s secretary-general.
Mr Guillen, who was critically injured but survived, had handled several rights-related cases, notably the police killings of nine members of an Indigenous peoples’ group.
