It seems there is no limit to what the Duterte administration would do to show to its followers that it is serious in making good his promise to combat illegal drugs, crime, and corruption. After sending thousands of mostly young and poor Filipinos to their graves in its bloody and brutal drug war, the administration now wants to send to jail mostly young and poor children not even in their teens for both major and petty crimes.
Instead of utilizing government resources to go after drug lords, the police, encouraged by President Duterte’s orders to go all-out against both users and dealers and his promise of full protection and just rewards for cooperative cops, gunned down thousands of mostly lowly drug users and dealers on the pretext of resisting arrest. And yet, you can count on your fingers the number of known big drug lords who have been arrested, much less convicted, of distributing illegal drugs in the country.
The President and “his” policemen claim crime rate has gone down drastically since the drug war, but while petty theft and similar minor crimes have probably indeed gone down, it seems drug smuggling, murder and other major crimes have only risen based on the multi-billion peso shabu smuggling scandals, and the almost daily murder of local officials, prosecutors, lawyers, politicians, and other persons.
The irony of it all is that despite the murderous crackdown, government statistics showed that instead of stopping the drug menace, the number of drug users in the country actually more than doubled from 1.5 million at the end of 2015 to 4.7 million in 2017.
As deaths mounted on the country’s streets, the President spurned criticism from all over the world with this brash statement: “I don’t care about human rights, believe me.” Duterte argued that the situation in the country was not merely a crisis; rather, it is a war. He invoked the “articles of war” and said that “human rights cannot be used as a shield or an excuse to destroy the country.”
In its one-track mission to rid the country of shabu users, the Duterte administration is actually sending the wrong message to the country’s youth, the sector he claims he wants to protect with his war on drugs, that the rule of law and the right of the people to due process and the presumption of innocence until proven guilty can be sacrificed in the altar of supposed peace and order. And that murder is a rightful weapon to attain a drug-free society.
Continuing his campaign against crime, Duterte next went after the lowly “tambays.” Saying they were just “potential trouble to the public,” the President ordered a crackdown on “tambays” or street loiterers in June last year. Within days after Duterte’s order, 7,000 “tambays” were arrested by the overeager police. Never mind that vagrancy was decriminalized in 2012 and no law has been passed to make vagrancy a crime again.
And now, Duterte and his allies in Congress now want to go after the country’s children, the supposed beneficiaries of his crime drive. Claiming that criminal syndicates are using children for their crime activities because they know that the kids would just as soon be released because of a law that exempts a child who is under 15 years old or younger at the time of the commission of the crime from criminal liability and would only be subjected to an intervention program from the government.
Instead of going hammers and tongs against these syndicates, the government would rather go after the poor children, who are actually the victims here just as the lowly drug users are the victims of drug syndicates.
The House approved on second reading a bill that lowered the age of criminal liability to 12 years old.
HB 8858, backed of course by President Rodrigo Duterte and Speaker Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, was approved by the House justice committee last Monday and approved by the entire House without debates two days later. Members of the “lower” House are either in a hurry to jail pre-teen offenders, or are too lazy to even research the matter or too subservient to Duterte and Arroyo, or both.
House justice committee chairman Oriental Mindoro Rep. Salvador Leachon – which makes me embarrassed that a congressman from my home province would sponsor such a horrendous bill – said the measure was not railroaded because they held 11 committee hearings on the matter. Most of those who testified at the hearing warned the committee against further lowering the age of criminal liability but none of them mattered to the “honorable” congressmen.
The House justice committee had originally wanted to lower the age to nine years old! That’s the age Duterte wanted when he slammed Sen. Francis Pangilinan of the opposition Liberal Party, of course, over the Juvenile Offenders Act, which pegged the age of criminal liability to 15 last year. Thanks to the outrage raised by the public and human rights groups, Leachon and his colleagues relented and raised it to 12 years old.
But pegging it to 12 still does not make sense.
Child rights advocates, including UNICEF Philippine representative Lotta Sylwander, say that studies have shown that the brain function reaches the age of maturity at the age of 16. They may know what is right and wrong before that age, but may not be able to discern fully the consequences of their actions.
There is a reason only those 18 years old and above are allowed to vote, enter into contracts, gain legal employment and enter into marriage. And that is because that’s the age considered to be old enough to make the right decisions.
Leachon said children in conflict with the law would not be jailed in ordinary prisons but in reformative institutions like the Bahay Pag-asa. But he admitted that there are only 58 operational youth care facilities nationwide, which are already overcrowded and understaffed, thus unable to function properly as envisioned by the law.
We all know that those pre-teen and teenaged offenders would eventually be put in jail along with the adults, and we know how tough that would be for these children just starting to mold their future.
Other lawmakers and child rights advocates warned that children in conflict with the law might end up ‘scarred for life or dead’ in prisons for adults because of the lack of reformative facilities in the country.
“By incarcerating children at such a young age, they, in fact, become well-trained criminals by being brought up in prisons with other criminals,” Sylwander said.
HB 8858 should be rejected because like the bloody drug war, it targets mostly the poor and leaves no room for rehabilitation.