Various indigenous peoples’ groups Friday appealed to the Supreme Court to scrap the Anti-Terrorism Law, claiming the act violates their right to self-determination.
Representatives from IP alliance KATRIBU, Muslim activist, and 2019 senatorial candidate Samira Gutoc, Lumad leaders, and other Moro and IP organizations filed at least the 26th petition against the controversial anti-terrorism law.
The IP groups said the right to self-determination, which is supported by the Constitution, authorizes the right to criticize and oppose “development aggression and the policy of militarization that comes with it.”
They added the law could increase the instances in which indigenous people would be tagged as communist rebels or supporters.
“The indigenous peoples’ assertion of their rights and their consequent opposition to development aggression should never serve as a justification for red-baiting or red-tagging since it is but an exercise of their constitutionally guaranteed rights to self-determination,” they said in the petition.
They also cited the petition from the Department of Justice to declare hundreds of Communist Party of the Philippines and the New Peoples’ Army members, including advocates for indigenous peoples as terrorists.
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“The passage of RA 11479 will even potentially exponentially increase the instances of this red-baiting on three grounds: its vague provisions, its disregard for the context of the indigenous peoples, and it’s giving more power to State forces, most of whom have been at the forefront of the abuses against the indigenous peoples,” the petitioners said.
They also argued that the anti-terror law will also place Moro people in “grave insecurity,” claiming that Muslims have long been stereotyped as terrorists.
“The labels ‘terrorist’ and ‘insurgents’ have become the catch-all pretext to legitimize attacks on them,” the petitioners said of indigenous and Moro peoples.
“Far from a law that protects, RA 11479 legitimizes the structural violence already perpetuated against them and is repugnant to constitutional
values,” they said.
Retired justices Antonio Carpio and Conchita Carpio Morales, four members of the commission that drafted the 1987 Constitution, lawyers, professors, lawmakers, youth leaders, journalists, artists, labor groups, activists, have also filed petitions against the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020.