Talk at the International Conference for Human Rights and Peace in the Philippines

By ANTONIO TUJAN JR.
Director, IBON International

PANEL 1. Economic, political and social crisis globally and in the Philippines, and implications on peace and human rights in the Philippines

Quezon City, Philippines
19 July 2013

Three years since the declaration by international economic institutions such as the IMF and the OECD that global recession in 2008 has ended in 2010, the absence of recovery has befuddled imperialist apologists and economists alike. So-called “post-recession” recovery by industrialized countries like US, UK and Japan remains very weak, seemingly teetering on the brink of another recession despite spending hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out banking and other financial institutions and various efforts at pump priming to fund recovery.

The creeping effect of this “non-recession” has now spread further to the economic heartland of Europe, as countries like France and Germany now face the threat of recession. On the other hand, many Eurozone countries such as Greece and Spain continue to bear the brunt of depression, as their sovereign debts crises remain unsolved and now threaten to infect even major industrial powers like Italy.

The so-called rise of emerging economies is imperialist hype to cover up the sorry state of developed countries reeling from crisis with the illusion of a “rebalancing” world economy. It also feeds into the strategy of monopoly capital to intensify the extraction of superprofits from the developing countries through various means, including through financial speculation riding on the so-called emerging economies.

This crisis is akin to the Great Depression of the 1930’s in its intensity but unlike it altogether. First, the scale of trade and financial integration through the policy of neoliberal globalization both feeds on and intensifies the crisis. Second, the possibility accorded by financial liberalization for further multiplying super-profit taking through financial speculation has created a new phenomenon of intensifying the effects of the crisis on the real economy. Third, the overweening power of the financial oligarchy over capital, both public and private, allows it to engineer autonomous opportunities for financial and commodity market growth, with its own speculative busts.

This is another depression, a lingering protracted depression, is fed by financial speculation seeking its end but also exacerbating it.

Continuing factors for depression, threats of new bubble bursting

This creeping, protracted depression affecting world monopoly capital has not seen its end.

Ghost recovery, continuing features of depression

The so-called economic recovery since 2011 remains sluggish and unclear. A growing number of countries have fallen back into double-dip recession, while US recovery has been feeble. There has been no recovery in productive sectors such as manufacturing and other industries. The jobs that were lost from 2008 onwards have not been recovered, and unemployment remains severe—thus the term “jobless growth.” Financial crashes remain continual phenomena.

By end-2012, the UN World Economic Situation and Prospects 2013 report had already presented dire economic forecasts about the risk of what it called “synchronized economic downturn” across many developed and developing countries.

The UN WESP 2013 report said that based on a set of assumptions in the UN baseline forecast, growth of world gross product (WGP) is expected to reach 2.2% in 2012 and is forecast to remain well below potential at 2.4% in 2013 and 3.2% in 2014. (See chart below) “At this moderate pace, many economies will continue to operate below potential and will not recover the jobs lost during the Great Recession.” ¹

Six months later, this risk of “synchronized economic downturn” remains. In the latest World Economic Outlook (WEO) update dated 9 July 2013, the IMF acknowledged that global growth is “projected to remain subdued” at 3.1% in 2013, about the same as in 2012 and less than the 3.3% forecast in April 2013 WEO.² The chart below, taken from the IMF WEO for July 2013, shows global GDP growth (projected figures on gray background) up to Q3 2013.

At this point (end-June 2013), the Eurozone is now in its longest recession since the end of World War II, with economic activity across its 17 countries falling for the seventh quarter in a row from Q4 2011 to Q2 2013. The economies of France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands have generally shrunk. The growth in Germany, the region’s strongest economy, just eked out a 0.1% growth on a quarterly basis, but also shrunk by 0.2% year-on-year. Ten-year data on year-on-year GDP growth of Europe’s biggest economies—Germany, France, and Italy—are graphically shown below, superimposed on equivalent data for the whole Eurozone.³

While a slight improvement shown in Q2 2013 led Eurozone officials to expect some sort of uptick in the second half of 2013, other economists remain guarded since no real growth drivers have clearly emerged.⁴

The U.S. economy appeared to fare better compared to Europe (see graph below)⁵, but in fact its own recovery remains ephemeral. The reason is that the U.S. economy is being turbo-propped by an unsustainable printing of dollars, with the Federal Reserve issuing $85 billion every month. The irony is that, instead of stimulating the real economy, more than 80% of the Fed’s excess reserves remain idle in private banks. These idle reserves have turned into yet another form of financial speculation, likened by some economists to a ticking time bomb. Outside of the US, other Central Banks have adopted similar “quantitative easing” remedies to open investment markets.⁶

The IMF has also recently acknowledged that the so-called emerging economies are growing more slowly than previously projected. The factors for this includes reduced US and European demand for exports from Brazil and Russia; China readjusting its priorities towards domestic consumer spending; and other emerging markets weakened by the pullout of foreign direct investments. A recent ILO report also showed that the new recession conditions in Europe have been spilling over globally.⁷

New bubbles threatening to burst amid threats of default, bailouts

As many economists have noted, indicators of economic recovery merely show the same old up-and-down economic and financial cycles in transitory periods of uptick. They are now warning of new bubbles threatening to burst. [See note]

[Start of note]

Global strategist Kit Juckes of Société Générale is actually calling the post-2008 signs of recovery as “the bubble with no name (yet)”. See his explanation below, describing the pattern behind “three significant financial bubbles of the last 30 years” with an accompanying graph showing a correlation between nominal GDP and Fed policy in generating bubbles.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/most-important-charts-in-the-world-2013-6#kit-juckes-socit-gnrale-we-dont-know-what-this-bubble-will-be-called-yet-24

[End of note]

Europe seemed to stabilize after ECB vowed “to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro,” but there is a big worry that the recent indicators of recovering growth is mostly a bubble that will burst sooner or later.⁸

As of April 2013, 41 different countries have active debt arrangements with the IMF; some are outright bailouts.⁹ Most of these loans come with very stringent conditions, which in the past the IMF imposed only on poor countries. But now more and more rich nations, such as Greece, Portugal, and Ireland are getting bailed out with IMF help, and agreeing to harsh austerity measures in exchange.

But the IMF’s funding depends on five largest creditors: the U.S., Japan, Germany, France, and the U.K.—countries that are in deep debt themselves. Thus these bailouts are increasingly unsustainable.

Thus, while the bailouts may have gained some breathing space for selected businesses and banks that are deemed “too big to fail,” the economies reel from one bailout crisis to the next as they fail to generate enough jobs and consumer demand. On top of this, the accompanying austerity measures have hit the poorest sectors of the population in developed and developing countries alike.

Unemployment, loss of income

Although the epicenter of the continuing global crisis in recent years has been in the most developed economies, its social impact has been truly global. As an ILO 2013 special report said, the advanced economies may have accounted for half of the total increase in unemployment of 28 million since 2008, but the crisis has had “significant spillovers into the labour markets of developing economies as well.”

An accumulated total of 197 million people were without a job in 2012. Significantly, 3 out of 4 newly unemployed in 2012 came from outside the advanced economies, with marked increases in East Asia, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Globally, some 39 million dropped out of the labor market, while the global jobs gap since 2007 has risen to 67 million.

Despite the prospects of growth in 2013-14, the number of unemployed worldwide is expected to rise by 5.1 million in 2013 (bringing the total to 202 million), and by another 3 million in 2014.

The report explicitly acknowledged the direct role of fiscal austerity programs in employment and wage cutbacks, and that macro imbalances have been passed on to the labour market and weakened it to significant degrees.¹⁰

The other key messages of the ILO 2013 report include the following:

• Policy incoherence has led to heightened uncertainty, preventing stronger investment and faster job creation

• The continuing nature of the crisis has worsened extended unemployment spells and labour market mismatches, intensifying downside labour market risks.

• Job creation rates are particularly low, as typically happens after a financial crisis

• The jobs crisis pushes more and more women and men out of the labour market

• Youth remain particularly affected by the crisis

Among the advanced economies, joblessness has particularly worsened in Europe, with some countries hitting record highs in recent months. (Italy’s unemployment rose to 12% in end-May 2013—the worst since 1977.) In the US, the latest Job Report is optimistic only because “new jobs” are being created but the unemployment rate remains, because full-time jobs are giving way to part-time jobs.¹¹

Growing unemployment, wage and benefit cutbacks, and loss of livelihood opportunities are all contributing to a generalized loss of income for big sections of the population in most countries. Despite claims by the IMF and World Bank that MDG 1 on reducing poverty (in terms of halving the number of people living on $1.25 daily) had been achieved globally, the truth is that multidimensional poverty remains a severe global problem.

For example, in the most recent Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) released just this March 2013, the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) reported that a total of 1.6 billion people continue to live in multidimensional poverty. This is more than 30% of the combined population of the 104 countries covered by the study. The report also said that at the present rate, the best-performing countries may be able to halve their MPI “in less than 10 years and eradicate it within 20”—certainly a very slow rate.¹²

Food crisis, losses from natural calamities

In recent years, high food prices have become the “new normal.” Despite lower demand and a slight decline in cereal prices due to stagnant economies, food prices remained high or volatile. This is mostly the result of financial speculation in agricultural commodities, which has become an increasing arena of neoliberal globalization—as a series of UNCTAD papers as well as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food have officially asserted. The speculation has spilled over to not just commodities but to farmland and irrigation water sources.¹³

In addition, losses from the more unpredictable natural calamities due to climate change are contributing to the price and supply volatility. For example, the US drought in 2012 (the worst in 50 years, and which has persisted in nearly 20% of the country up to 2013) drove up maize prices to record levels, while heavy rains in Argentina and Russia affected wheat supply and prices. In October 2012, the UN warned that failing harvests in the US, Ukraine and elsewhere “have eroded [world grain] reserves to their lowest level since 1974,” and that extreme weather events this year could trigger another major food crisis.¹⁴

Strategic economic approaches to address crisis in the context of neoliberal globalization

Monopoly capitalist states in the US and elsewhere in the West, in their aim to stave off recessionary crisis and later ensure quick recovery, have responded in a two-stage way: First, through bail-outs of ailing banks, other financial institutions, and selected giant corporations considered “too big to fail”. And second, when the immense public deficits turned into huge sovereign debts, by imposing austerity measures and related efforts in their attempt to defuse the debt crisis.

Meanwhile, these powerful states assiduously defend the same basic economic and financial policies of neoliberalism that caused or aggravated the recessionary crisis in the first place. They pursued only those paltry reforms in secondary fiscal and financial issues, which in effect constituted a mere slap on the hand and only affecting a few criminal speculators—intended to keep financial speculation within manageable bounds but not to impose real regulation. Such reforms included cursory responses to issues dear to the hearts of most investors themselves, such as tax havens and capital flight.

A growing popular clamor led by social movements against neoliberal globalization, periodically exploding into massive protests, have been met with deceptive and defensive propaganda if not outright fascist attacks by police and intelligence agencies. Even proposals from mainstream economists for return to a modicum of economic regulation and protection remain unheeded.

Instead, the US and its imperialist allies have been adopting new strategic approaches to cope with the multiple crises while continuing to seek and pursue all avenues of gradual recovery.

Buying into the new green

Some of these strategic approaches have been filtered into UN processes such as the UNFCCC and post-2015 (along with the parallel process of SDGs), carefully packaged to project a broad international consensus and to rebuild the framework of multilateralism. But lurking behind these processes are efforts by the imperialist powers to ensure the continuing dominance of monopoly capital and neoliberal globalization.

Green economy is not a simple PR ploy by big business and OECD governments; neither is it a simple response to the challenge for sustainability because of climate change. Monopoly capital sees the green initiative as a combination of two related strategies: on one hand, harness the role of innovation and high-tech to spur recovery of industry; and on the other hand, develop a new process or movement of neo-colonial exploitation funded through public-private investment in the guise of climate change funding.

Strategic role of Greater East Asia

As the protracted depression continues to linger, the big Asian economies are taking on a more strategic role of spurring the global economy. This role is being played by China, South Korea, and first-tier South East Asian countries (and to a certain degree India and Australia), which are relatively better off economically. Even Japan, stagnant for decades now, still has substantial economic clout. These countries are able to stimulate sluggish consumer spending and international trade, and to support the large appetites of foreign investments and even of speculative financial markets. A modicum of prosperity and consumer capacity also supports a degree of middle class growth, which in turn tends to dampen class conflicts and strengthens perceptions of democracy and political stability.

This strategic role of East Asia is increasingly reflected in the competing efforts of the US and EU to craft various bilateral and plurilateral pacts in East Asia, such as the Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) being negotiated by EU with India and the ASEAN. Russia is also aggressively elbowing into the region to strike its own deals and expand its own economic sphere of influence.

This strategic role of East Asia, now clearly appreciated by the US and its allies, is at the core of what is being hyped as the “Asian Century”—a catchword that is partly economic truth, partly investment hype, but in any case represents a geopolitical shift of focus. It is also reflected in heightened US-EU interest in regional structures of governance such as the APEC and East Asia Summit. On the other hand, the strategic refocusing is hindered, in the case of the US, by its deep involvements in the Middle East, and by economic troubles in the case of EU.

The TPPA as the new US “can opener”

Closely related to the strategic shift to East Asia is the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), a comprehensive trade deal being cooked up by the US. The countries involved in the TPP negotiations are Australia, Brunei, Chile, Canada, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, and even Japan. The deal is so shrouded in secrecy that even the US Congress remains in the dark, while representatives of US multinationals are “being consulted and made privy to the details of the agreement.”¹⁵

If signed into law, the TPPA would empower MNCs to bypass national laws and courts and urge its own supra-national courts (supervised by the World Bank and UN) to impose neoliberal policies and standards—even US laws—in a wide range of trade questions, including medicine, agriculture, intellectual copyright, and so on. The US hopes for the TPPA to gain momentum until it becomes a fait accompli and pries open all remaining trade restrictions by Asia-Pacific states.

Reconfiguring imperialist “multilateralism” through the G20

With the 2008 economic collapse, the G7 imperialist powers lost much credibility to dictate economic policy on the whole world, while giving no quarters to developing countries led by the G77 and China bloc. Increasing conflicts between the imperialist bloc and the G77-China bloc have resulted in repeated deadlocks on critical global issues, including those being tackled in the climate change (UNFCCC) talks and in the WTO Doha Round. This intensifying dissent by developing countries within the UN and other multilateral bodies is often branded as the so-called “failure of multilateralism.”

In this light, the formation of the G20 is yet another strategy to forge a new imperialist consensus. The idea behind the G20 is to bring the “emerging economies” (such as the BRICS and other large developing countries) into its fold, as a bit of window dressing to rebuild the façade of international consensus around its overall policy of neoliberal globalization. This way, liberal and progressive initiatives that find their way into the system, such as proposals to reform the system of development finance, are sidelined, while G7 (with G20) policies are defended.

New WTO approach in Bali

The Doha Development Round under the WTO was a deal breaker, considering both the impact of implementing WTO and the implications of further liberalization under the new proposed provisions. The failure to conclude the Doha Round is symptomatic of the crisis—the intensity of protests and public opinion against it, the tenacity of developing-country positions, and the hardline US-EU demands and positions. Despite the efforts of the G7 and the G20—and the UN itself—to sell it, the Doha Round’s demise has been finally accepted by the WTO.

In its stead, a new Ministerial is scheduled in December 2013, which will attempt to pick up the pieces of the different failed efforts to expand the WTO since the first Ministerial in Singapore in 1996. Many issues arising from Singapore through Cancun and Doha are being considered again for debate and possible negotiation. While people’s movements persistently call for an end to the WTO as one of the emblematic symbols of neoliberal globalization, here come the imperialists redoubling their efforts to revive and re-gear the WTO for further expansion.

Section III. Rising factors for people’s resistance, armed conflicts

Mass protests

By end-June 2013, as The Economist itself noted, a wave of anger rose up and began “sweeping the cities of the world.” The otherwise staid publication even compared 2013 to the 1848 revolutions that swept Europe and to the 1968 and 1989 rebellions. Comparing the 2013 mass upsurge with the 2011 Occupy protests, which were high profile but did not mobilize millions, the magazine noted that this time “the protests are fed by deep discontent.”¹⁶

A distinctive trend in the first six months of 2013 is that the most dramatic mass upsurges have broken out in what are considered emerging economies, in addition to the Eurozone countries that have been battered by austerity programs and debt crises.

In Brazil, the massive demonstrations (which reached more than 1 million people on June 20) started as a mass protest against bus fares. It soon broadened into a much wider range of issues that reflected the Brazilian government’s anti-people policies, including corruption, poor public services, high cost of living, and profligate spending such as on the World Cup sports event.¹⁷

In India, big protest actions have risen to the forefront earlier in 2011, fuelled by working-class strikes and middle-class frustrations with corruption, on top of a growing Maoist armed revolution in the countryside. At the end of 2012, big protests verging on riots in reaction to the gang rape of a young woman were actually addressing the lack of state protection vs women and their rights.

Massive protests have also broken out in Egypt in response to the failure of the Morsi regime to respond to public demand for reforms in the face of the economic crisis. The protests have led to a military take-over of government. Elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa, mass protests continue to simmer. Similar mass protests are hounding governments in Turkey and Bulgaria, with specific issues sparking mass actions that rapidly grew into much wider protest movements.

In Europe, sustained mass resistance including workers’ strikes continues to build up over gradually tightening austerity measures and worsening unemployment amid recurrent sovereign debt crises. The protests are particularly intense in Mediterranean countries such as Greece, Spain, and Italy. Violent riots also occurred in Sweden in May 2013 and earlier in the U.K. in 2011, as the youth and other unemployed spontaneously sought varied channels of mass discontent. ¹⁸

Armed conflicts

Amid multiple crises and mass discontent, global peace remained as elusive as ever. According to the 2013 Global Peace Index of the Institute for Economics and Peace, the peace situation has deteriorated in 110 out of 162 countries since 2008 due to political instability, internal armed conflicts, and boundary disputes.¹⁹

In the most severe cases, the US and its imperialist allies are deeply involved—either through direct foreign military intervention (as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and recently in Mali), or through client states (as in the Israeli-Palestine conflict), or through proxy “rebel groups”, as is the case of the Free Syrian Army in Syria and an assortment of NATO-backed armed groups that overthrew the Qaddafi regime in Libya.

Section IV. Increasing fascism and militarism

Rising trend of fascism

The trend of fascism continues to rise worldwide, and its worst features are becoming more evident than ever even in the supposed bulwarks of Western democracy, namely the US and UK. With the recent NSA espionage exposés divulged by Edward Snowden, it is now evident more than ever that the US has become a national security state, closely followed by the U.K.

Alarmingly, various US legislation—the PATRIOT Act, the Protect America Act, the Military Commissions Act, and the FISA Amendments Act—have expanded the legally allowable state actions (on top of secret and illegal operations) that restrict basic civil liberties and human rights in the guise of counter-terrorism.

The NSA spying scandal (and previous similar exposés) reveal not merely massive violations of US citizens’ privacy rights, but other countries’ national security as well as their citizens’ rights. Surveillance is increasingly serving as prelude to actual attacks on people and their rights—especially now that drone technology is applied both for surveillance and actual kill operations.

Even worse, the scale of secret US operations divulged by a whole series of whistle-blowers shows an immensely huge potential for its monopoly capitalist class to extremely centralize the key machineries of state power in the hands of a neo-conservative, militarist, and fascist clique.

Human rights violations by the “national security” state

The US, which in the past prided itself as the global champion of human rights, has been showing more of its fangs not just overseas but within its homeland. It has a fast-growing record of domestic human rights violations, on top of its bloody international record of launching interventionist wars, supporting fascist dictatorships, and serving as principal arms supplier in other countries.

Within the US homeland, abuse of ordinary citizens by police, FBI, and Homeland Security operatives, are on the rise, on top of increasing cases of violent dispersal of protest rallies. Racial discrimination, hate crimes, and abusive treatment of immigrants are as prevalent as ever. The notorious record of US federal prisons as well as increasingly privatized state prisons is already well known. The US is among the world’s most heavily armed populations, with more than 100,000 people gunned down yearly. Yet increasing crime is made a reason to expand the forces and functions of the national security state.

Incredible as it may seem, but up to now, the U.S. has not participated in or ratified a series of core UN conventions on human rights, such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.²⁰

A similar trend of rising fascism can also be seen in other developed countries, in emerging economies, as well as in developing countries (especially those long ruled by fascist dictatorships and military regimes supported by the US and its allies).

Rising trend of militarism

There has always been a direct connection between economic downturns and the trend for increased militarism and military spending. Armed conflicts between countries, as well as large-scale domestic violence, have long tended to flare up in times of intense economic and social crises.

More to the point, a number of huge business conglomerates have direct interests in the growth of defense-related industries. Thus, while the rest of the global economy suffered from doldrums in recent years, military spending has continued to bloat up.

The whole world’s military expenditures in 2012 are estimated to have reached $1.756 trillion, corresponding to 2.5% of world GDP. A handful of military powers are spending the largest sums. In 2012, for example, the 15 countries with the highest military spending accounted for over 81% of the total. The US is responsible for 39% of the world total; China is a poor second at 9.5%; China, Russia, UK, and Japan combined (the next biggest spenders after US) spent only 21.6%.

Indeed, another SIPRI report in 2004 presented the irony of a yawning gap between the world’s total military expenditures and funding to alleviate poverty and promote development.²¹ In fact, the entire budget of the United Nations and all its agencies and funds pale in comparison to the world’s total military expenditures.²²

The US military pivot to East Asia

At present, the US remains as the foremost promoter of militarism. At the same time, the imperialist shift of focus to East Asia (in economic terms) is backed by a US strategic military pivot plus political and diplomatic policy.

According to a top Chinese expert on Middle East affairs (as cited by Russia Today), there is a consensus among US think-thanks that the Asia pivot intends to attain three objectives:

1. To protect present US dominance over the shipping lanes from the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea;

2. To “defend the chokepoints” in case they are closed by hostile states (e.g. Iran for the Strait of Hormuz); and

3. To prevent other powers (presumably China, to some extent India or even Russia) from becoming a real threat to US dominance

Despite the U.S. military’s down-sized budget, it plans to implement a long-term strategic transfer of forces to Asia-Pacific destinations from 2011 to 2020. These include air power (tactical aircraft, bombers); US Army troops and US Marines; and high-tech weaponry. The US has implemented a rotating scheme, which will eventually involve some 2,500 US Marines. By 2020, the US Navy intends to increase the deployment of its naval assets in Asia Pacific to 60% (from the current 50%).

This pivot also includes strengthening the US military presence based in Japan (especially its strategic missile force) and supporting Japan vs China in their dispute over the strategic Diaoyu islands. The US already has strategic joint operations with Australia, and is eyeing wider U.S. ship access to Vietnam’s Cam Ranh Bay facilities.²³

On the diplomatic front, Washington is also fast-tracking its strengthening of military ties with ASEAN countries, including former enemy Vietnam and former villain Myanmar. It is planning to host its first meeting with ASEAN defense minister in Hawaii in 2014. It is also pushing for redefined VFAs or basing arrangements with countries such as the Philippines.

China’s response

China’s response so far has been to forcefully signal that it will oppose the US rebalancing act. It has continued its own diplomatic crusade to neutralize ASEAN hostility vs its South China Sea claims.

At the same time, China appears to be giving a bigger weight to the Middle East as a strategic theater for economic, political, diplomatic, and military competition with the US. It has further stepped up its diplomatic campaign in all global regions, giving special attention to Africa and Latin America, on top of its efforts to lead the G77 bloc in UN processes and debates.

Intensification of US-China cyber war

The recent years have seen a scaling up of capabilities as well as operations in cyber warfare among the world’s military powers, with the U.S. and China engaging in a high-profile battle of wits and accusations and counter-accusations of cyber espionage. The EU and other countries are trying to catch up with their own cyberwar capabilities, if only to strengthen their own defenses vs cyber-attacks. This concern has worsened recently, with the EU openly complaining that it was itself a target of NSA operations (as per Snowden revelations).

Some implications of these international trends on the Philippines

1. Mixed economic impacts amidst deep and unresolved social crisis

The seeming immunity of some East Asian economies to the worst effects of the global crises due to certain transient factors, including the role of China, makes these countries a temporary beneficiary of incoming FDI flows on top of overseas remittances. Thus, the Philippines can still boast of investment and credit rating upgrades from the likes of Fitch Ratings and Standard & Poor. At the same time, the country’s economic fundamentals in the various sectors of production and trade remain unstable, while the OFW situation is gradually being affected by political instabilities in other parts of the world.

The Philippine state under the Aquino presidency remains as one of Asia’s holdout fanatic followers of the anti-poor neoliberal policy dictates, as can be seen in its dogged pursuit of privatization (in the form of PPPs and support for previously privatized utilities) and liberalization. These have resulted in relentless increases in the cost of living, opening up the country’s natural resources to further plunder, and generally increased attacks vs rights of labor, peasantry, indigenous peoples, homeless, and student-youth.

2. Increasing US presence and bullying

The US pivot to Asia, its rivalries with China, and its potential involvement in domestic armed conflicts and inter-country disputes (including the South China Sea boundary disputes), all point to the trend of a bigger US diplomatic and military presence in the Philippines.

According to a Chicago Tribune news item in November 2012: As of October 2012, “70 U.S. Navy ships had passed through Subic, more than the 55 in 2011 and the 51 in 2010. The Pentagon says more than 100 U.S. planes stop over each month at Clark…” In 2012, South Korea’s Hanjin Heavy Industries, a big investor in the Subic shipyards, agreed to set up a maintenance and logistics hub to serve U.S. warships jointly with Pentagon contractor Huntington Ingalls Industries,

The news item also cited an editor of IHS Jane’s Defense Weekly as saying: “It’s like leasing a car as opposed to buying it—all the advantages of ownership with a reduced risk.” Looking at Subic, the defense editor said, “the U.S. will be leveraging Philippine bases and assets, privately owned assets, and all at a fraction of the monetary and political price of taking back ownership of the base. It gives the U.S. the same strategic reach that basing would have done but without all the hassle.”

Furthermore, recent irritants that worsened the China-Philippine dispute over the Spratleys and a few other islands in the South China Sea are being used both by the US and Philippine governments to justify the expanded US military presence in the country. These are on top of previous other alibis, such as to assist in the modernization and training of the AFP, to help boost the local economy, and to support the campaign vs terrorism. The US is also seeking access to an even wider range of ports and airports in the country.

3. Implications on peace and human rights advocacy

With increased US support for the Aquino regime as a whole, and for its armed services (AFP and PNP) in particular, we can expect a more complex situation and bigger challenges, with international, regional, and domestic factors entangled, in the area of peace-building and human rights advocacy.

We are starting to see in the country the impact of the “national security state” doctrine and practice in the Aquino government’s pursuit of laws versus cybercrime and in support of NSA-type surveillance, as well as in the current civic-action, psy-war, intelligence, and combat components of the counter-insurgency program Oplan Bayanihan. At the same time, we are seeing the various pressure factors that are undermining the GPH-MILF and GPH-NDFP peace processes.

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Keynote Speech at the International Conference on Human Rights and Peace in the Philippines

Quezon City, Philippines
July 19, 2013

By JEANNE MIRER
President, International Association of Democratic Lawyers

I want to thank the organizers of this important conference for the gracious invitation to address you today. I am the President of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers or IADL. IADL from its inception in 1946 has fought for the rights of peoples throughout the world to live in peace with human dignity. We were founded to promote the goals of the United Nations Charter and through the common action of lawyers, side by side with the peoples of the world we work to promote these important goals.

I have been a peoples’ lawyer for forty two years and the organization in the United States in which I work is the National Lawyers Guild or NLG. The NLG last year celebrated its 75th anniversary. The NLG was instrumental in the founding of the IADL and has always supported its work.

I have always felt especially close to our friends in the Philippines and the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers since as a college student in the late 1960s I studied the American War against the Philippines. I was interested in studying the contending forces in the United States which lined up for and against the US effort to become a colonial power, replacing Spain as the overlords of the Filipino people after purchasing the Philippines from Spain for 20 million dollars. I studied the efforts of the Anti-Imperialist League to try to stop and end the war, and their efforts to expose US atrocities in the execution of the war. At the time I was searching for the roots in American history of the American war against Vietnam, and saw many parallels between the two wars and how the Anti-Imperialist League had not been able to hold back or defeat the forces of expansion. But as the internal logic of capitalism requires expansion and growing profits, the forces for expansion had the upper hand. Also, one cannot underestimate the role racism played in both the United States’ wars against the Philippines and Vietnam, but one thing is certain, ever since the American war against the Philippines there has been an ever growing military industrial complex which today is the largest in the world and which through the hundreds of military bases around the world is able to protect the economic interests of the United States and multinational corporations. This military industrial complex also increases the likelihood that throughout the world international, and intra national disputes will turn to military options as a first rather than last resort.

This year, 2013 is the fiftieth anniversary for two important events. Both of which I experienced. The first is Bob Dylan singing “Masters of War” which was published in 1963 and is his homage to the U.S. Military Industrial Complex. Some of the most relevant verses come to mind:

Come you masters of war
You that build the big guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

* *.

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul.

The second is the fiftieth anniversary of the historic 1963 march on Washington which attracted hundreds of thousands of marchers, which I attended as a teenager, and in which Martin Luther King delivered what has come to be known as his “I have a Dream” speech. This march occurred 100 years after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Lincoln which freed the slaves, only to see that charter of freedom, and the 13th Amendment which enshrined it become a hollow promise, with the advent of Jim Crow laws and de jure segregation. Before Martin Luther King turned to the hopeful and forward looking portions of his speech, in which he articulated a hope and dream for a non-racial and non-racist future, he discussed the reality of racism in the United States: He said:

“One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense, we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.

This note was a promise that all men – yes, black men as well as white men – would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note in so far as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds”.

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.

I have been reflecting a lot lately on these two aspects of the 1960s struggles and what might be called anthems of the American anti-war and civil rights movements.

There is no question but the United States is the largest supplier of arms to the world and that all of the industries which profit from supporting a large military, and never saw a war they did not want to fight, are some of the first to criticize the peoples’ movements for economic justice where the demand is made for the government to provide basic economic human rights such as decent work, housing, health care and food and education. But, in Masters of War, we do not hear that as a matter of law both the threat of or the use of force in settling international disputes are actually illegal under the United Nations Charter, or that even taking up arms in self-defense is legally limited only to instances where it is necessary to repel an armed attack or in the absence of an armed attack, that the threat of armed attack is so “instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation”. In “Masters of War” Dylan does not acknowledge that Article 26 of the UN Charter commits the world to work toward disarmament.

There are similar types of omissions from Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. That is, although by 1968 Martin Luther King, had denounced the American War against Vietnam, and had become a champion of the struggle for economic justice as well as civil rights, and was assassinated the night after marching with striking sanitation workers in Memphis Tennessee, in his 1963 “ I Have A Dream” speech, referenced only the Declaration of Independence. He did not acknowledge the existence of such important declarations as the 1944 Declaration of Philadelphia where the International Labor Organization had declared: (a) labour is not a commodity; (b) freedom of expression and of association are essential to sustained progress; (c) poverty anywhere constitutes a danger to prosperity everywhere; (d) the war against want is required to be carried on with unrelenting vigor within each nation, and by continuous and concerted international effort in which the representatives of workers and employers, enjoying equal status with those of Governments, join with them in free discussion and democratic decision with a view to the promotion of the common welfare and that all national and international policies and measures, in particular those of an economic and financial character, should be judged in this light and accepted only in so far as they may be held to promote and not to hinder the achievement of this fundamental objective;

We know the Declaration of Philadelphia was a source for inspiration of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights or UDHR. The UDHR declares both civil and political rights and economic social and cultural rights to be the basic rights everyone has a right to enjoy, and which declares the fundamental human rights all persons, have a right to expect. But there is no reference to the Philadelphia Declaration or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the “I have A Dream” speech.

Why did Bob Dylan in “Masters of War” omit any mention of the right to peace in the UN Charter, and why is there no mention of the UDHR in Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech? It is true that the United Nations at this time was somewhat paralyzed by the Cold War resulting in the general population not paying much attention to it, especially after the UN General Assembly initiated the “Police Action” on the Korean Peninsula in 1059. It is also true that in 1963 the United States was just emerging from the anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy period, and Martin Luther King was always suspected of being a communist, and was spied on by the FBI for most of his life and that reference to economic human rights would have likely been considered subversive. And while I know songs or speeches do not cover everything, I am quite sure that a major reason why neither Dylan in “”Masters of War” did not mention the UN Charter nor did Martin Luther King in his “I have a Dream” speech reference the UDHR or other international human rights instruments, is that in the US and most likely all countries of the world, these documents and the rights and duties they spell out have been made to disappear so that the people do not know of their existence and/or that their governments have ratified these documents. Knowing that one’s government has committed through ratification of the UN Charter to respect international law to peacefully settle international disputes or to implement basic human rights can be a major and powerful boost to people in their day to day struggles for human rights and peace in world. It is precisely for this reason why I believe there is a conspiracy of silence about them. The rights and duties required under the UN Charter or in basic human rights documents are not even taught in law schools, which begs the question of how can peoples’ lawyers articulate these rights to the people or try to enforce them in the domestic courts or international agencies if we ourselves remain in the dark?

What can we do to change this state of affairs and lack of knowledge? In early 2011 the International Committee of the National Lawyers Guild put on a webinar entitled: “Human Rights 101 Using International Instruments to Work for Economic Social and Cultural Rights.” The audio recording and the power point are still available on the web at:

http://www.nlginternational.org/webinars/humanrights-mirer.mp3 and

http://www.nlginternational.org/webinars/humanrights-mirer.pdf

While this webinar and power point are more specific to the United States situation as the US has not ratified the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights, I would like to go over some of the information from this webinar as part of this speech so as to familiarize you with topics which you will likely hear throughout this conference.

It is important therefore to consider the basic human rights treaties from the perspective of their role in promoting peace and also what has happened in the world order which has undermined the progressive realization of basic human rights.

The Universal Declaration although signed and executed in 1948 reflects the recognition in the 1945 United Nations Charter of the direct link between promoting and protecting human rights and ending the conditions that lead to war. The preamble to the UN Charter recognizes that the peoples of the world have the right to live in peace. It is important to quote the preamble:

WE THE PEOPLES (emphasis on the people not states) OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED

• to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and

• to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and

• to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and

• to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

The Charter begins with these inspirational and aspirational words embracing human rights as fundamental to the promotion of social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom. One of the first actions of the UN was to identify these human rights and they did so through producing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or UDHR. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights which was not a treaty but a relatively short, inspirational and energizing document usable by the people and designed to be the foundation and central document for an international bill of human rights. It was the first document to combine both civil and political rights and economic, social and cultural rights in one indivisible whole. The Universal Declaration connected the issue of realization of all human rights to the cause of peace and states that a common understanding of these rights is of great importance to their realization. This is evident in the Preamble to the UDHR which states.

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,

Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,

Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,

Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,

The UDHR is set forth in 30 Articles as follows:

Article 1 reflects the inspirational nature of the project. It proclaims in ringing terms that:

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood”.

Article 7 follows up this theme by saying that all are to be equal before the law and have a right to protection against any form of discrimination.

Articles 3 and 25 are probably the core of the substantive provisions in the Declaration. They give every human being the rights to life, to liberty, to security of person (Art 3); and to an adequate standard of living (Art 25). Articles 1, 3 and 7 constitute the UDHR’s core civil and political rights. Article 25 is the core of the economic and social rights. The right to an adequate standard of living is interesting in that it specifies as part of it the right to health and well-being not only of a person but of his or her family, but also the right to necessary food, clothing, housing and medical care, and the right to social security (also covered in Art 22). Article 23 also spells out the right to work under decent conditions of work, and for workers to form trade unions to protect their interests.

Article 28 is one of the most important Articles in that it states Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in with the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

The UDHR brought the world into the modern era of rights by introducing and/or reinforcing at least five key concepts:

1. All human rights have both negative and positive components (i.e. they address both what government should and should not do);

2. Human rights include the economic and social sphere, in particular issues of education, housing health, work, food and social security;

3. Rights are universal, transcending national borders, and their legitimacy is no longer dependent on national recognition;

4. Prohibitions on discrimination in the protection of human rights extend both to the purpose and the effect of government action and inaction; and

5. Human rights are interdependent and cannot be viewed in isolation.

When the General Assembly passed the Universal Declaration the resolution included a provision that called upon all Member countries to publicize the text of the Declaration, and “to cause it to be displayed, read and expounded principally in schools and other educational institutions without distinction based on political status of countries or territories.”

As I have said, this obligation to publicize has been virtually ignored and at least in the United States, the rights contained in the UDHR and subsequent human rights instruments have remained largely invisible to the people. The same can be said for the two major human rights treaties which were written to implement the rights in the UDHR: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights. (ICESCR).

The covenants were simultaneously adopted on December 16, 1966 and put forward for ratification by member states. Enough member states had ratified them as of January 3, 1976 that they went into effect. The overwhelming majority of countries in the world have ratified both the ICCPR and the ICESCR. This includes the Philippines, but does not include the United States which has only ratified the ICCPR. I want to focus primarily on the ICESCR as it is the deprivation of basic economic human rights which makes the day to day struggle for survival the primary focus of peoples’ lives making it difficult to exercise their civil and political rights.

The Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights has five parts.

Part 1 (Article 1) recognizes the right of all peoples to self-determination including the right to “freely determine their political status” to pursue their economic, social and cultural goals, and manage and dispose of their own resources. It recognizes a negative right of a people not to be deprived of its means of subsistence and imposes an obligation on those parties still responsible for non-self-governing and trust territories (colonies) to encourage and respect their self-determination.

Part 2 (Articles 2 – 5) establishes the duty of State Parties to use and devote the maximum of its available resources to using progressively realize the rights contained in the Covenant. It also requires the rights be recognized “without discrimination of any kind as to race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. The rights can only be limited by law, in a manner compatible with the nature of the rights, and only for the purpose of “promoting the general welfare in a democratic society”.

Part 3 (Articles 6 – 15) lists the rights themselves. These include rights to

• work, under “just and favorable conditions”, with the right to form and join trade unions (Articles 6, 7, and 8);

• social security, including social insurance (Article 9);

• family life, including paid parental leave and the protection of children (Article 10);

• an adequate standard of living, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and the “continuous improvement of living conditions” (Article 11);

• health, specifically “the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health” (Article 12);

• education, including free universal primary education, generally available secondary education and equally accessible higher education. This should be directed to “the full development of the human personality and the sense of its dignity”, and enable all persons to participate effectively in society (Articles 13 and 14);

• participation in cultural life (Article 15).

Many of these provisions include specific actions which must be undertaken to realize them.

Part 4 (Articles 16 – 25) governs reporting and monitoring of the Covenant and the steps taken by the parties to implement it. It also allows the monitoring body – originally the United Nations Economic and Social Council – now the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights to make general recommendations to the UN General Assembly on appropriate measures to realize the rights (Article 21)

Part 5 (Articles 26 – 31) governs ratification, entry into force, and amendment of the Covenant.

The heart of the ICESCR appears in Principle of progressive realization. Paragraph one of Article 2 states: Each State Party to the present Covenant undertakes to take steps, individually and through international assistance and co-operation, especially economic and technical, to the maximum of its available resources, with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of the rights recognized in the present Covenant by all appropriate means, including particularly the adoption of legislative measures.

The duty to take steps to progressively realize the rights in the Covenant is not a hollow duty. It is a continuing affirmative obligation. It also rules out deliberately regressive measures which impede that goal.

The Treaty Body responsible for interpreting and enforcing the provisions of the ICESCR is the Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights. The Committee has issued in General comment 3 a full description of what taking steps to progressively realize the rights in the Covenant.

The principal obligation of result reflected in article 2 (1) is to take steps “with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of the rights recognized” in the Covenant. The term “progressive realization” is often used to describe the intent of this phrase. The concept of progressive realization constitutes recognition of the fact that full realization of all economic, social and cultural rights will generally not be able to be achieved in a short period of time. In this sense the obligation differs significantly from that contained in article 2 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which embodies an immediate obligation to respect and ensure all of the relevant rights. Nevertheless, the fact that realization over time, or in other words progressively, is foreseen under the Covenant should not be misinterpreted as depriving the obligation of all meaningful content. It is on the one hand a necessary flexibility device, reflecting the realities of the real world and the difficulties involved for any country in ensuring full realization of economic, social and cultural rights. On the other hand, the phrase must be read in the light of the overall objective, indeed the raison d’être, of the Covenant which is to establish clear obligations for States parties in respect of the full realization of the rights in question. It thus imposes an obligation to move as expeditiously and effectively as possible towards that goal. Moreover, any deliberately retrogressive measures in that regard would require the most careful consideration and would need to be fully justified by reference to the totality of the rights provided for in the Covenant and in the context of the full use of the maximum available resources.

This last sentence, regarding retrogressive measures comes from Article 5 which prohibits States, groups or persons from taking any action or activity aimed at the destruction of any of the rights or freedoms recognized in the present Covenant. That is, once a State has recognized a right contained in the Covenant, in law or practice, and has implemented it, it cannot legally be revoked, nor can a State which may have protected a right to a degree higher than called for in the Covenant, remove that right based on the fact that the Covenant provides lesser protection.

Furthermore, the principle of progressive realization has an affirmative obligation not to discriminate in the provision of these rights on the basis of race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

The enacting of anti-discrimination provisions and the establishment of enforceable rights with judicial remedies within national legal systems are considered to be appropriate means.

Since 1966 there have been many more important international and regional human rights instruments debated and promulgated in addition to the ICCPR and the ICESCR. However, parallel to but on a completely different track was the rise of powerful multinational corporations and international financial institutions which arose out of the Bretton Woods agreements and were supposed to stabilize the world economy, but in fact have been doing the bidding of former colonial powers, large nations and multinational corporations. The International Labor Organizations’ 1944 Declaration of Philadelphia is still operative and still holds that fighting the war against want must be pursued with vigor and the world’s economic and financial character, should be judged in this light and accepted only in so far as they may be held to promote and not to hinder the achievement of this fundamental objective, and as Article 28 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights still requires the development and maintenance of a social and economic order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in the Declaration can be fully realized, yet International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have been requiring States to distort their economies and the labor and human rights protections in these documents by conditioning loans and other financial resources on so-called liberalization policies which are part of the neo-liberal economic order which we are suffering with at this time.

This has resulted in a highly undemocratic international economic order. In May 2013 the IADL held a conference in Paris aimed at promoting a new democratic international economic order where we described the current undemocratic international neo-liberal economic order as being dominated by large multinational corporations which seek “liberalization” of laws protecting people in order to promote economies based on the market rather than human rights and needs of people, which includes the right to a healthy environment. We described the main pillars of the neo-liberal economic order to be: (1) deregulation of corporate activities including financial services, (2) privatization of public services such as education and prisons etc.; (3) de-unionization of the workforce, (4) casualization of the workforce with precarious workers i.e temporary, contingent or contract workers; and (5) free trade agreements aimed at protecting direct foreign investments by corporations to the detriment of indigenous rights. We pointed to the massive transfers of wealth upwards into to fewer and fewer wealthy hands both within countries and between countries with growing levels of inequality in both developed and developing countries. We noted the massive public debts owed to international financial institutions and private investors, especially by countries in the South. We also noted the unrest among the people suffering under these policies are dealt with by repression using, among other things, anti-terrorist laws that many countries passed or imposed after 9-11. They are also dealt with by surveillance and the type of national security state revealed by both Bradley Manning and now Edward Snowden.

We also emphasized the militarization which accompanies this economic order reflecting the powerful corporate military industrial complex and a foreign policy based on military intervention in countries which possess resources the United States and the western former colonial powers and their major corporations seek to exploit.

We pointed out that media corporations promote celebrity and spectacles as news and do not seek to educate the people about the nature of the current order and differences between people based on class, race, gender, religion, and citizenship status, and other characteristics are exploited in order to divert attention away from the fact that these divisions are a result of and exacerbated the economic order. Most importantly, we pointed to both an ignorance of and lack of respect for law and legal obligations, especially international law and international human rights (including labor) law and growing impunity for violating international law. We noted wars of aggression have been fought by superpowers without accountability. Corporations are engaging in illegal land grabbing and other illegal actions in developing countries without accountability.

What does all this mean for us at this conference and our friends throughout the Philippines? As understand it, the Philippine government has a policy designed to warm the neo-liberal heart, a policy which stems from the Presidential Decree under Marcos which has been accepted since known as the automatic appropriation for debt service which requires external debt to be paid before any other budgetary appropriation can be made. This provision was unsuccessfully challenged in 1991 when the Philippine Supreme Court said the policy did not contravene the Philippine Constitution which assigned the highest budgetary priority to education.

But, the Philippine constitution in Article II Section 2 has an inclusion clause whereby the Philippines adopts the generally accepted principles of international law as part of the law of the land… The inclusion of international law would mean the human rights treaties such as the ICESCR which the Philippines has signed and/or ratified as well as the UN Charter and the ILO Constitution which incorporates the Declaration of Philadelphia are part of the law of the land.

I understand that this automatic appropriation for debt service has impeded the Philippine government from living up to its obligations under the ICESCR specifically the obligations to devote the maximum available resources progressively realize the rights contained therein, or to realize the rights under Philippine laws which have been passed to ameliorate the suffering of the Filipino people. The Filipino people have been promised rights under their laws and their constitution as well as International Human Rights treaties they have ratified, but as long as the law which allocates a large portion of the Philippine treasury to pay debt service, that promise is illusory. They have been given the type of bad check, as Martin Luther King stated was given by the United States to African Americans which came back marked insufficient funds.

It is time we say that human rights trump property interests such as service on external debt. It is time that we learned to use human rights law to challenge policies like the automatic appropriation for debt service policy to ensure that the Filipinos can make the Philippine government actually devote maximum available resources to progressively realize basic economic human rights as articulated in the ICESCR and the UDHR. As Martin Luther King stated, we must reject gradualism as the answer. We must embrace the fierce urgency of now. It is time to judge policies which govern the Philippine government’s ability to fight the war on want by accepting laws only in so far as they may be held to promote and not to hinder achievement of this fundamental objective, and to accept laws only in so far as they comply with the command of Article 28 the UDHR to allow everyone to enjoy a social and economic order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in the Declaration can be fully realized.

These same arguments regarding the primacy of human rights law apply throughout the world, in all countries, including those which do not have a policy of automatic appropriation for debt service which siphons funds away from meeting human rights obligations. We must fight to make economic interests adhere to human rights principles. In so doing we can re-write the words to “Masters of War” and inscribe into the history books how the peoples’ fight for human rights allowed us to become the Masters of Peace.