ONE of the most applauded statements of the President in his State of the Nation Address (SONA) was his claim that he fights for human life, and not for human rights.
Yet, it was also one of the most criticized by the political opposition. Leni Robredo, Noynoy Aquino and their cohorts in the opposition and critics of the President make it appear that he has made out human life and human rights to be mutually exclusive.
Indeed, it is wrong to say that they are mutually exclusive. But the President did not actually say that they were. And it is equally wrong to imply that they are one and the same, which is what his critics are saying.
To better understand the relationship between human life on one hand, and human rights on the other, one has to go back to the evolution of the doctrine of rights as an essential feature of modern democracies. Emerging from decades of political violence, where states committed untold horror on their citizens, and on citizens of other countries with which they were at war, modern states saw it as necessary to install mechanisms to protect the rights of individuals against the actions of their governments.
Theoretically, however, the doctrine of rights goes back to the classical theories of the state, particularly on the social contract theory, where citizens wanted to avoid a state where they may have perfect freedom to exercise their individual rights, but such could easily degenerate into a state of war. Hence, citizens decided to form a state to whom they would “surrender” their rights, not necessarily to lose it, but in exchange for the state’s duty to protect those rights. Hobbes differed from Locke on the manner of such surrender, where the former talked of it as an absolute one, the latter talked of a conditional one which can be taken back if the state fails to live up to its end of the social contract. Rousseau’s idea of a social contract was different, since he viewed it as a restraint on state power, to prevent the state from acting on behalf of the political elites. Hobbes and Locke viewed civil society as an outcome of the social contract, while Rousseau saw civil society as a product of human greed, and the social contract was a necessary instrument to protect citizens’ rights.
The general principle behind the social contract theory is that the state, in pursuance of its contract with the sovereign citizens, is duty bound to ensure that their individual rights are protected. This is the Western model of human rights, where collective rights are expressed only as derived from individual rights, and where states legislate and enforce laws to promote these rights.
Non-Western models which value collectivist, communitarian perspectives, look at collective rights not as an aggregation of all individual rights, but as one that possesses an autonomous logic. In the non-Western model, a political community’s right to exist is presumed to be a separable telos or goal, and to which individuals must submit. When conflict exists between individual and collective rights, the later would prevail.
In the Western model, the collective right of a community only exists in relation to how it can protect individual rights. The right of a political community to exist is derived from its individual members. A Bill of Rights is always present in any Constitution and is expressed as a defense of individuals against the power of the state. When there are conflicts, such as when the exercise of an individual of his or her right undermines or threatens the right of the political community to exist, or when the exercise by one of his or her right undermines that of another, then the state has to rely on the institutions of law to set the standard to adjudicate these conflicts. A state can deny one person the exercise of his or her right — one can be detained or imprisoned despite the right to freedom, or even be executed despite the right to life — only when such person has transgressed the laws, and only being accorded the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, to a fair trial and to due process.
There is only one instance when a person can violate the right to life of another, and this is in the context of self-defense, when there is a clear and present danger where it would be a justifiable course of action.
More importantly, the act of the state is always derived from its duty to protect the individual rights of its citizens to be secure in their persons and their homes and to be free from criminality and political violence. Unfortunately, while the state is entrusted with the mandate to protect the very existence of the Republic, and can act to deter threats to it, it can only raise the issue of self-defense not as an organic juridical entity, but only as expressed through threats to its individual agents.
Thus, while the President can declare martial law and suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus or call on the military to quell rebellion or terrorism, or to declare an all-out war against criminal gangs and drug syndicates, the Philippine state doesn’t have an organic right to take away life without due process of law. It is only in armed confrontations when state agents may take away the rights to life of the criminals and rebels in self-defense, but only as a last recourse, and under proper rules of engagement, and within the terms of international treaties and conventions in which the Philippines is a signatory.
Much as we still possess elements of the non-Western worldview, as evidenced by our strong communitarian traditions, our social contract — that is, our Constitution — is crafted using a Western rubric. Hence, the Philippine state is expected to privilege individual rights, even of those who threaten not only its collective rights, but also the rights of majority of its citizens. This is the position of human rights advocates.
The President, however, appears to challenge this Western view of states and rights, when he said that he values human life, and not human rights. He deployed an organic, autonomous right to life of the collective Filipino nation, which carries with it the right to protect itself. And this means privileging the right to life of those it has sworn to protect over the human rights of individuals whose actions tend to threaten the life of its citizens, and the life, or the very existence, of the political community and the Republic.
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