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Davao City, Philippines,
30 January 2009
delivered by
LEILA M. DE LIMA
Chairperson
Maayong Buntag kanatong tanan!
To our gracious hosts, Mayor Rodrigo R. Duterte and Councilor Paolo Z. Duterte represented today by Councilor Pete Laviña and Councilor Edgar Ibuyan, respectively, DILG Chief Gaudioso Catubig, Jr. and CHR Regional Director Alberto B. Sipaco, our staff, both from the central and regional offices, in the Commission on Human Rights and most especially, to our Barangay Human Rights Action Officers, good morning and welcome to the BHRAC Orientation and Capacity Building Seminar.
Some of you may remember the declarations made during the re-launch of the BHRAC program last August, here in Davao . For the benefit of our new BHRAOs and for our invited guests, I will revisit these statements.
The BHRAC Program is a very humble program that garners very little attention. It's re-launch did not involve an opulent display of inaugural celebrations. It was not graced by heads of national government agencies, a battery of diplomats or international representatives or heads of state. Today is quite the exception, to have the Honorable Mayor and Councilor host and join us.
To this day, the BHRAC Program does not have a permanent office space in the CHR Central Headquarters. It is simply integrated into our Education and Research Office. The volunteers, the BHRAOs, comprise the bulk of the manpower of the BHRAC. To ask them to be human rights advocates on their own, to ask them to be vigilant & courageous is a tall order. To ask them to brave when facing threats to human rights is more than the honorarium the Commission can possibly offer them.
And yet, as humble as the BHRAC Program is, it is coined as the flagship program of the Commission on Human Rights. It is possibly the single most important program in the race to promote human rights throughout the countryside. It is a deceptively modest program of placing human rights activism at the very bottom of the political hierarchy, in the barangays. Yet, it represents the most ambitious attempt to forward the tenets of human rights to every man, woman and child, precisely by reaching out to them at the barangay level.
The importance of the program lies in some of its key features:
The BHRAC is a flagship project because it represents the most ambitious, deliriously idealistic and hopeful long term goal of the Commission in promoting human rights protection: the goal bringing human rights awareness into every family, every home in every community throughout the country. Human rights must seep into the core of our values as a nation, as a people.
It is so important and so innovative that the international community has recognized the BHRAC as a model program for our counterpart National Human Rights Institutions throughout the ASEAN and the Asia-Pacific region. In fact, the various NHRI representatives and international human rights advocates present at the recent consultative meeting of ASEAN NHRI Forum in Bangkok, Thailand, again inquired into the details of the program. The BHRAC program, to our mind, is the most imaginative method of human rights promotion and protection that we had seen in recent years, and our international partners agree with us.
There are many human rights issues that specifically concern the BHRAC. On the barangay level, the issue of voters' rights has been an ongoing program. The goal is to educate barangay residents of the invaluable contribution that can make to bringing change to the country with their single vote. It must be done as early as now, by promoting voter registration. And it must overcome the apathy and hopelessness that many Filipinos feel – that their one vote does little to overcome electoral and government corruption. One vote seems as small as one barangay in the greater scheme of things. But change must start not with the winning president or any other winning elected official – it must start in the hearts of each Filipino.
Another barangay-centered human rights concern is the matter of corruption .
May I inform you that the CHR, in partnership with BISYON 2020 and Transparency International under the auspices of UNDP, had just concluded a 2-day 1 st Integrity and Human Rights Conference where we highlighted and dissected the close relationship between corruption and human rights. For those of you who have been following some of the most sensational congressional hearings – the Alabang Boys case involving the PDEA and DOJ, the Fertilizer Scam involving the DAR, and the ZTE deal – involving various officials from the Executive, you could sense that our reliance on high-level investigations leads to nothing but grandstanding on television. It makes for incredibly popular reality-television, but there is no resolution. But corruption is not hopelessly impossible to overcome. There are so many examples of corruption thwarted and the best of them began at the barangay levels, where the community banded together to fight corruption. Cases involving mining firms who collaborate with local government and the DENR, that perpetrate illegal extractions of minerals and pollute rivers have become national news because of the communities that had clamored for investigation. The quarries of Pampanga, long the source of diverted local government money, have been effectively managed with integrity not only by Gov. Ed Panlilio, but through the help of the locals living near the quarries. Corruption is widespread and our focus on national level corruption severely underestimates local level corruption. The BHRAOs must be on the front lines of local level campaigns in organizing barangays to thwart corruption. Can you imagine the reduction in diverted government wealth if all 22,000 barangays could stop corruption at the local level?
Other issues include violence against women and children, internal displacement during armed conflict, agrarian reform. There are many issues that start on the barangay level, and it is precisely the presence of the BHRAOs at that level that will help the Commission advance the campaign of human rights.
Now that we had created this breakthrough program, it is time to make it effective. Those of you who are now part of the BHRAC Program will be part of an overhaul, a new design of the program to make your work more effective and responsive to human rights protection and promotion. Because the program is of such vital importance, and the potential is limitless, we fully intend to create a structure that supports each and every BHRAO, to make your work meaningful, to make your efforts matter in the national campaign for human rights.
The changes will cover many aspects of the BHRAC structure. It will improve coordination with and supervision from the CHR Regional Offices. It will facilitate the transmittal of reports, the delivery of support to the BHRAOs, the deployment of investigators and other regional staff into the barangays. It will improve monitoring of BHRAO activities, outputs and updates. Last, but not least, it will include human rights and para-legal training for the BHRAOs.
The potential for improvement is limitless. The potential for effectiveness is limitless as well. The CHR cannot do it with out you. You must be with us on this. You have to share not only in the excitement that I feel, but share in the dream and vision that I have for the BHRAC. I need you to feel that you can truly be human rights defenders.
May you all have a fruitful seminar today. I look forward to having all of you on board when time comes that the Barangay Human Rights Program truly becomes the transformative force in human rights promotion and protection.
Daghang Salamat Gyud!
Thank you and Mabuhay Kayong Lahat!