The Center for Trade Union and Human Rights (CTUHR) welcomes the report submitted by Mr. Morris Tidball-Binz, United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, to the 59^th session of the UN Human Rights Council regarding the human rights of families of victims of unlawful killings. (Link: https://docs.un.org/en/A/HRC/59/54)

Tidball-Binz’s report consolidates and strengthens existing provisions of international human rights and humanitarian law regarding the rights of families of victims of extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary killings.

Using an expansive definition of families, the report considers families of victims of unlawful killings as victims themselves who have the right to life; security of person; truth; freedom from physical and psychological torture, and other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment; protection from enforced disappearance; and privacy and family life, including freedom to hold funeral rites.

The report also recognizes families’ rights to participation in investigations; protection; reparations; peaceful assembly and associations; and the bodies of their dead loved ones. It presents families’ rights under special circumstances such as migration, armed conflict, death in custody, the death penalty, terrorism and counter-terrorism and targeting of families.

The UN Special Rapporteur’s report is very relevant to the Philippines, where countless families of victims of unlawful killings have been suffering for years. The Philippines has become notorious the world over not only for former President Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody war on drugs but also for the extrajudicial killings of activists during Martial Law and since the early 2000s to the present.

From the Duterte regime to the present alone, 72 labor activists have fallen victim to extrajudicial killings and their families continue to suffer from the trauma, pain and lack of justice. The Ferdinand Marcos Jr government, despite its rhetoric of upholding labor and human rights, has failed to investigate and attain justice for any of these victims.

The Marcos Jr government refuses to lift a finger to uphold the rights of families of victims of unlawful killings. It does not engage and cooperate with families, their organizations, and other civil society and social movement organizations that seek to empower them to claim their rights.

Despite the noisy rivalry between the Marcoses and the Dutertes, and despite his approval of Duterte’s International Criminal Court arrest, Marcos Jr has not taken concrete steps to seek justice for victims of unlawful killings in the labor movement and beyond. He at best is ignoring the opportunity to do so or is at worst presiding over the sweeping of those crimes under the rug.