Aquino missed the chance of making Human Rights Day more meaningful

Missing since March 9, 2010

Malacanang’s enumeration of its human rights initiatives last Monday, International Human Rights Day, would have been more meaningful had President Aquino signed the proposed “Anti-Enforced or Involuntary Disappearance Act of 2012″ which had been on his table for almost three weeks.

Fernando “Butch” Fortuna, Jr: his son disappeared more than two years ago.

Families of those who just “disappeared” from the face of the earth, most of them for their political beliefs, were fervently hoping for an early Christmas gift for the President. But alas, there was no such gift from the President.

Fernando “Butch” Fortuna, a taxi driver, tearfully appealed to the President to help find his son Daryl who was forcibly taken, with an female companion , Jinky Garcia, and Ronron Landingin, one evening in Masinloc, Zambales by men suspected to be members of the 24th Infantry Batallion of the Philippine ArmyB-PA while he was in an outreach activity in connection with his thesis. At that time, Daryl was a graduating student of the Polytechnic University of the Philippines.

“Naghahanap pa rin kami. Hindi namin alam kung ano ang aming gagawin (We are still looking. We don’t know what to do,” Fortuna said.

Come January 8, they will again observe the birthday of Daryl, who would be 25. “Hirap na kami We are suffering).”

Sana matulungan kami ni Presidente. Sana pirmahan na ni Presidente ang (anti-Enforced Disappearances) bill para hindi na mangyayari sa iba. (I hope the President would help us. I hope he would sign the bill so that (what happened to my son) would not happen to others.”

(A human rights worker said they learned later that Landingin is now a member of the military.)

In a statement, the Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances,Families of Victims of Involuntary Disappearance, and the Philippine Alliance of Human Rights Advocates, said “Enforced disappearance is considered as one of the cruelest forms of human rights violations. It violates practically all basic human rights of the disappeared including some of the civil, political and socio-economic rights of their families.”
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