High-level ILO mission to probe slays, abuses

The International Labor Organization (ILO) is sending high-level representatives to conduct a one-week fact-finding to the Philippines this month to look into labor rights violations and to investigate the unexplained killing of labor union leaders.

The team, composed of representatives from Geneva, Switzerland and ILO Asia-Pacific, will conduct consultations with government officials and workers’ groups and inspect two major manufacturing plants in central and southern Luzon. They will be in the country from Sept. 22 to 29.

Members of the ILO mission include Tim de Meyer who is a standards specialist of ILO’s subregional office in Bangkok; Cleopatra Doumbia-Henry, director of International Labor Standards Department of ILO Geneva; and Karen Curtis, deputy director of the International Labor Standards Department of ILO Geneva.

Militant labor group Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU) said the team will also meet with families of victims of extra-judicial killings, forced disappearances and labor-related harassments.

Another mandate of the team would be to make an objective assessment of the practical implementation and actual impact of various legislative, executive and administrative measures announced by the government in response to previous ILO actions, with a view to determining whether these measures have been effective in eliminating the practice of forced labor.

In making its assessment, the team will take into account in particular the views of victims and families of some 98 labor union leaders who were killed. The team is expected to submit a report to the ILO governing body within the year.

Although the number of killings dropped in 2007 and 2008 after much condemnation by human rights groups and international pressure, extrajudicial killings have persisted in the Philippines.

In 2007, UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston visited the Philippines to probe human rights conditions in the country. After the mission, Alston issued a report that blamed members of the military for many killings and disappearances of left-wing activists.

Apart from trade unionists, hundreds of political activists, journalists, and religious leaders in the Philippines have been killed or abducted since 2001.

However, the Arroyo government continues to deny any involvement of the country’s military in the killings, despite evidence presented by the UN and other international human rights watchdogs.

The KMU said it formed the ILO Watch to maximize the ILO mission in exposing and fighting trade union rights repression in the country.

KMU filed in 2006 the complaint from which the fact-finding mission was conceived as a response by the ILO.

Other local non-government organization that will provide the ILO delegates with inputs on the current situation in the country are the Center for Trade Union and Human Rights (CTUHR), an independent non-profit non-government institution focused on monitoring and documenting labor rights violations, which provided many of the case reports in the complaint; the Pro-Labor Legal Assistance Center (Place), which served as legal counsel for the complaint; and the Anakpawis partylist, which represents workers in Congress among other marginalized sectors.

The ILO Watch aims to be a broad network that will gather all initiatives for the campaign against labor rights repression from various groups and individuals.

A complaint was filed with the ILO on Sept. 18, 2006 involving 64 workers who fell victims to extra-judicial killings since Arroyo’s presidency in 2001.

After the complaint, 28 more workers were added to the list. Also, a relatively new form of repression hit the workers since last year after the complaint: using trumped up criminal charges to detain workers, according to KMU.

Multiple murder, multiple frustrated murder, arson, and other grave criminal charges were slapped on more than a hundred workers even without preliminary investigation.

Six have already been jailed because of this. More and more factories have been turned into military camps to silence unions, KMU added. –Michaela P. del Callar, Daily Tribune