The Iceland led resolution that adopted
a resolution that would allow the body
to investigate the human rights situation in the Philippines.
The reports showed that 18 of the 47
member states voted in favor of the draft resolution filed by Iceland which
asked UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet to prepare a
“comprehensive written report” on the country’s human rights situation.
Our Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA)Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. in his tweet said most likely the
resolution will be ignored.
DFA Secretary Teodoro Locsin, Jr. (photo credit to owner) |
The DFA also released an official
statement regarding the adoption of the Iceland resolution by the Human Rights
Council, which we are quoting in full for the benefit of all our readers.
STATEMENT OF PHILIPPINE FOREIGN
AFFAIRS SECRETARY TEODORO L. LOCSIN, JR. ON THE ADOPTION OF THE ICELAND
RESOLUTION BY THE HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL
In
1945, the Philippines, along with 50 other states, founded the United Nations.
We were not yet independent. But the Filipino people – for having taken in the
wretched of the earth – won its place at the Creation of the United Nations.
We
helped create the UN to honor the universal values of respect for sovereignty
and non-interference in the internal affairs of state which were brazenly and
brutally violated on a global scale by those who censured us today. There is
too the value of dialogue which is violated by the high-handed insistence that
it be one sided while the other side keeps quiet, the latter to speak in its
defense but only in proceedings dictated by the former to ensure its agreeable
result.
In the
process leading to the adoption of this resolution, we have witnessed the very
opposite of these values that hold the UN together. We have seen its mandate
“weaponized” for the sake of interests with the evident means to get it done.
This
resolution was not universally adopted. Therefore, its validity is highly
questionable. It does not represent the will of the Council, much less that of
the developing countries who are always the target of such resolutions.
Western countries pushed for this resolution in the confidence that the world has forgotten what they did and what should have been done to them had there been a Human Rights Council. It was pushed with the arrogance that developing countries must not stand up to them even if we can and as we hereby do. There will be consequences.
Western countries pushed for this resolution in the confidence that the world has forgotten what they did and what should have been done to them had there been a Human Rights Council. It was pushed with the arrogance that developing countries must not stand up to them even if we can and as we hereby do. There will be consequences.
They
sought to bring a people and a country, with an unblemished human rights
record, down to the level of the authors of atrocities the world must not
forget: of Amritsar, Mau Mau and the Boer War; Ragawede and the murder of Anne
Frank and her kind; the trendsetting holocaust of the Congo; the profiling of
Romani people; the massacre of aborigines at Forrest River; the culmination of
Leopold’s Ghost in Bergen-Belsen to name one of a sprawling network of
extermination camps; slave trading in the West Indies and the abduction of
Inuit children as part of the eradication of that race’s way of life; Addis
Ababa and the invention of death from above (though that distinction is shared
with the author of Amritsar); Setif and the drowning of North Africans in the
river Seine; the cowardice of European UN peacekeepers who stepped aside to
allow the massacre of those they had herded together for their safety; the
dissolution and consequent anarchy of North African and Middle Eastern
countries, and the revival of the slave trade from there; and the callous
expulsion of refugees crossing the Mediterranean to escape the European
miscalculation.
But we
will not engage in throwing at each other the bodies of each side’s respective
victims. We cannot compete with the West.
The
Philippines is affronted that we should be named with the very breath of these
authors of these atrocities, the same ones so bold to condemn us – we who
opened our arms to save their victims before the War, and well into the savage
wars of peace culminating in the Vietnam War to whose victims we gave shelter
when everyone else turned them away.
But
let us be clear on this: this resolution is not a triumph of human rights but a
travesty of them that should honor the character of the author and co-sponsors
of the resolution.
It is
an example of how these countries – they who are least entitled to make such
accusations, incited by false information from sources peddling their untruths
for money, or who have allowed themselves to be played by the ill will of a few
– have undermined the Human Rights Council to advance their agenda and target a
government that’s hostile to the very things they have done and continue to do,
and about which there is overwhelming proof.
This
resolution flies in the face of everything the Philippines has worked for when
it founded the Human Rights Council in 2006, and when it advanced the work
towards realizing a Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the 1940s,
insisting on strong commitments for justice, dignity and conscience, and the
rights of women — a concept almost unheard of then.
The
responsibility to protect starts with protecting the good against the bad, the
innocent against the vicious. We invoke the government’s great power – and
therefore commensurate responsibility – to protect human rights as multilateral
bodies cannot. Foremost among those rights is the right to be protected from
crime by the state.
Do not
presume to threaten states with accountability for a tough approach to crushing
crime, at which some of your countries are complicit at worst and tolerant at
best. You don’t have the wherewithal, so all you can do is insult. The United
Nations is a collection of sovereignties and not a sovereign collective.
Thus,
the Philippines rejects this resolution. It cannot, in good conscience, abide
by it. We will not accept a politically partisan and one-sided resolution, so
detached from the truth on the ground. It comes straight from the mouth of the
Queen in Alice in Wonderland, “First the judgment, then the proof.”
The
temptation is strong to walk away from all this with well-deserved contempt for
the minority of countries that have the least moral standing to raise their
false issues to the discredit of the Human Rights Council. But the Philippines
must remain true to the cause of human rights. We will continue to work in the
Council to advance a noble mandate to respect, protect and fulfill human
rights, and rescue it from its misuse.
The
Philippines renews its solemn responsibility to protect the law-abiding against
the lawless by any means efficient to achieve the defining purpose for the
existence and expense of a state. To that responsibility, my President has made
an iron, unwavering and total commitment; and it will not be weakened by this
ill-fated resolution.
Our foreign policy was summed up as being “Friend to all, enemy to
none.” In the face of today’s changing realities, I refined this to “Friend to
friends, enemy to enemies, and a worse enemy to false friends.” We renew our
solidarity with our true friends who have stood by us in this farce. But we
will not tolerate any form of disrespect or acts of bad faith. There will be
consequences; far-reaching ones.
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