GENEVA: A Muslim indigenous community in the southern Philippines has suffered widespread human right abuses that could intensify with President Rodrigo Duterte’s extension of martial law there, UN-appointed experts said.
Duterte has called the huge island of Mindanao a “flashpoint for trouble” and atrocities by militants and communist rebels. He placed it under martial law in May after militants took over the city of Marawi.
The five-month siege was the majority-Roman Catholic Philippines’ biggest security crisis in decades, killing more than 1,100 people, mostly militants.
Lawmakers this month overwhelmingly backed his plan to extend martial law there through 2018, which would be the country’s longest period of emergency rule since the 1970s era of strongman Ferdinand Marcos.
The militarisation had displaced thousands of the indigenous Lumad people and some had been killed, said Victoria Tauli-Corpuz and Cecilia Jimenez-Damary, the UN Human Rights Council’s special rapporteurs on the rights of indigenous peoples and internally displaced people.
“They are suffering massive abuses of their human rights, some of which are potentially irreversible,” the two said in a statement late on Wednesday.
“We fear the situation could deteriorate further if the extension of martial law until the end of 2018 results in even greater militarisation.”
The Philippines was obliged by international law to protect indigenous people and ensure human rights abuses were halted and prosecuted. “This includes killings and attacks allegedly carried out by members of the armed forces,” they said. — Reuters
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