The recently-approved resolution by the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) directing UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet to prepare a “comprehensive written report on the situation of human rights in the Philippines” within a year is an insult to Filipino voters. “Human rights” investigations are premised on the idea that an authoritarian regime motivated by its own devices is victimising its own people. However, the Philippine government is held to and, itself, complies with the tenets of the country’s 1987 Constitution. Philippine governments since 1987 are, in contrast, motivated by public approval.
This is an important point to highlight.
Under the Philippines’ 1987 Constitution, the current government of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is answerable only to the Filipino people. Duterte was first given a mandate to govern by Filipino voters in 2016. This year, an opposition bloc consisting of politicians campaigning on a “dissent” platform primarily against Duterte’s allegedly violent “war on drugs” suffered a catastrophic loss at the polls — again serving as continued validation of Filipinos’ approval of the way Duterte is running the country. Various satisfaction and approval polls conducted by reputable research firms over the last three years had also consistently affirmed the trust and approval of Filipinos Duterte enjoys.
In effect, the UNHRC presumes to second-guess the authority of the Filipino Voter. Even more disturbing, this “investigation” and other interventionist initiatives like it are outcomes of the incessant lobbying of the current Opposition — specifically the leading bloc within it known as the Yellowtards, elements rabidly loyal to the now-discredited Aquino-Cojuangco clan. For the first time in Philippine history since nationalism first became a buzzword in the mid- to late-Nineteenth Century, we are seeing a major Filipino political movement actually inviting Western European intervention back into their country.
Today’s Opposition are, in effect, lobbying for and promoting having the Philippines re-subject to Western European imperialism. They judge the mandate of Filipino voters as “idiotic” simply because what the general Filipino public approve of does not fit their preferred narrative — one that borrows heavily from (but laughably perverts) the thinking of former colonial masters.
The fact is, the Philippines remains a fully-functional democracy with a completely free (even rambunctious) press, fully independent co-equal branches of government that keep one another in check, and a dynamic free market economy.
Here, therefore is the important question Filipinos need to ask any “investigator” from the UNHRC:
On whose behalf are you conducting this “investigation”?
Is it on behalf of the Filipino people? It does not look like it. The government the UNHRC are investigating is one that is authorised to rule and represent the Filipino people.
Is it on behalf of an increasingly irrelevant political bloc? That looks more like the real story here.
The Yellowtards had suffered a three-decade decline from what was once an unmatched ascendancy in the Philippines’ political narrative. This decline saw a progressive dulling of their once brilliant “activist” crown jewel, “people power revolutions”. Their once-sacred colour, yellow, and their most distinguished salute, the “L” hand gesture, had been reduced to sad punchlines. The “heroes” they and their complicit Big Corporate Media cohorts propped up are now disgraced. And, as recent history would show, this irreversible decline culminated in 2016 when they lost an entire nation to a dark horse presidential candidate from Mindanao.
But of course the Yellowtards would not only be hopping mad, they’d be itching for revenge.
Unfortunately for them, that revenge did not come in the form of a legitimate election win this year. Nor is revenge forthcoming in the form of their long-obsolete million-head street rallies. And their biggest ally and most potent conduit into the heads of Filipinos — the Roman Catholic Church — is beset by its own crisis of legitimacy. It is therefore not surprising that the Yellowtards would mount an astounding campaign to bring the Philippines full circle back into the embrace of former imperial masters.
This is how dishonest the Yellowtards and the broader community of Opposition blocs that pander to them are. The UN, its various agencies, as well as the Big Corporate Meda outfits of the West that the Yellowtards have lied to over the last several years should consider the historical context of this monumental tantrum they have been sucked into.
Most important of all, Filipino voters should wisen up and see this “human rights” circus for what it is — a bald desperate last-ditch play for power by an utterly crushed but still-flailing Opposition curiosity.
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