In April 2019, Cristina Palabay received an unusual text message. Like a sinister chain letter, it said that she was going to die within the year, and that she was included in a list of people that will soon be killed.
In her line of work, it was impossible to take the message as an empty threat. Palabay, the secretary general of Karapatan, a coalition of human rights groups in the Philippines, received the message just hours after one of her colleagues, activist Bernardino Patigas, was shot to death in the southern province of Negros Occidental in the Philippines. Patigas, who was the head of a member organization of Karapatan, died while campaigning for a city council seat in the province.
“There are many threats that I face, as an individual and as part of Karapatan,” she said. “It’s a daily ordeal for me.”
Intimidation and threats have always been hazards for activists in the Philippines. Since President Rodrigo Duterte took office in 2016, his administration has targeted human rights defenders, accusing them, often without evidence, of collaborating with communists rebels and drug lords. However, the situation has worsened since the COVID-19 pandemic started, with government critics facing very concrete threats to their safety.
“What we are facing here in the Philippines is a pandemic of human rights violations,” Palabay said.
Data supports Palabay’s stance. According to an October report from American think-tank Freedom House, the Philippines is one of 80 countries that saw democratic freedoms decline during the pandemic. The study, which categorized the country as “partly free,” found abuses relating to repression of the media, restrictions on protests, illegal detention and improprieties with police evidence.
The threats to Karapatan — which means “rights” — is emblematic of the erosion of those democratic traits. Last July, Dan San Andres, a pastor and the chairperson of the group’s chapter in the eastern province of Bicol, was arrested on murder charges. Karapatan criticized the arrest, describing it as part of the Duterte administration’s “continuing crackdown and criminalization of human rights defenders.” The day after Andres’ arrest, the Philippine News Agency, the government’s newswire service, published a story that called San Andres a “militant leader” who goes by the alias “pastor.” In his counter-affidavit, San Andres said that he was holding a church service at the time the incident took place.
Karapatan has suffered tragic losses. Last August, Zara Alvarez, the former education director of the organization, was shot and killed by unknown assailants in the southern city of Bacolod. She was the 13th Karapatan member to be killed since the start of the Duterte administration on June 30, 2016. Palabay said that 30 of her colleagues have died.
Weakened democracies across Asia
Karapatan’s situation, while tragic, is not unheard of in repressive regimes across Asia.
According to the Democracy Report released in March 2020 by Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), a Swedish research institute, liberal democracy in the Asia-Pacific region has declined to levels last seen in the mid to late 1980s, when dictators such as the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos and South Korea’s Chun Doo-hwan were still in power. This fits into a worldwide shift towards autocratization. For the first time since 2001, a majority of countries in the world are now autocracies. These represent 92 nations that are home to 54 percent of the world’s population.
V-Dem’s Liberal Democracy Index, which measured the quality of elections, freedom of expression, checks on the executive branch and the rule of law from 2009 to 2019, shows that India ranked as one of the worst performing countries in the world, just behind Hungary, Turkey, Poland, Serbia and Brazil.
“India is on the verge of losing its status as a democracy due to the severely shrinking space for the media, civil society, and the opposition under Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi’s government,” the report says.
Henri Tiphagne, the executive director of Tamil Nadu (India)-based human rights organization People’s Watch, corroborated the findings, accusing the Modi administration of using the pandemic to silence critics.
“When the lockdown was at its height in New Delhi and the rest of the country… we saw that many students, professors, lawyers and others were punished (and) arrested for their alleged participation in instigating violence, he said.
“No one could understand how the entire country could be in lockdown and still people could be taken into custody against their own free will.”
Tiphagne said that the government justifies the imprisonment of dissidents through Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code, which allows local authorities to prohibit gatherings of four or more people. Anyone found in violation of the law may be arrested and detained by police, and charged with rioting. The law stops short of allowing law enforcers to use force, however, that has not kept police from beating people for violating lockdown rules. Last March, police killed an ambulance driver in Pune in the western state of Maharashtra. He was beaten to death by officers after being suspected of transporting passengers in his vehicle. That same month, a man was shot and killed by police in West Bengal after leaving the house to buy milk.
Equality in repression
With the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to linger, the situation for dissidents has become dire. According to Bertelsmann Foundation’s 2020 Transformation Index, there is widespread erosion of democratic principles amid today’s global health crisis. The report, which analyzed COVID-19 responses in 137 developing and transition countries, found that weaknesses relating to rule of law and political rights have been exacerbated.
“This is an unprecedented stress test for the stability of political institutions and the governance capacity of the states affected by the pandemic,” the report read.
However, the decline of democratic principles is not exclusive to countries struggling to contain COVID-19 outbreaks. India currently has the second most number of COVID-19 infections in the world with more than 9 million cases. The Philippines ranks second in Southeast Asia, just behind Indonesia, with more than 400,000 cases. Vietnam, meanwhile, has been hailed as a success story for preventing the spread of the virus in spite of sharing a 1,300 kilometer border with China. To date, the country, with its population of almost 96 million people, has just nearly 1,300 cases and 35 fatalities. Its success, however, has not come without a price.
Even before the pandemic, the country had one of the worst human rights records in the Southeast Asian region. The Communist Party of Vietnam, which has a monopoly on political power in the country, has sentenced dissidents to long jail terms and passed laws to stifle dissent. In V-Dem’s Liberal Democracy Index, the country ranked in the bottom 10 to 20 percent, alongside countries such as Russia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, and Belarus.
According to Tran Vi, the editor-in-chief of The Vietnamese, a news magazine that covers the human rights situation in the country, the government has used the pandemic to improve its methods of silencing critics online. The mechanism behind this repression is a new cybersecurity law, which went into effect last year, that compels Internet service providers to take down content deemed offensive by the Ministry of Information and Communications and the Ministry of Public Security.
“For people posting information on the pandemic on Facebook, asking questions about the disease or how the government is handling it, they could get into trouble by posting those things,” she said.
Tran’s publication has experienced repression first-hand. The website of The Vietnamese is blocked inside the country and is only accessible through VPN. The magazine’s staff writers and contributors also don’t publish articles under their real names due to safety concerns. Only the editorial board publishes articles with legitimate bylines. This openness among the magazine’s editors has come with consequences.
Last October, one of the publication’s editors, Pham Doan Trang, was arrested in Ho Chi Minh City and charged for disseminating propaganda against the state. Pham, who faces 20 years in prison, is one of the most prominent pro-democracy figures to be arrested in the country. In spite of her arrest, The Vietnamese continues to publish stories.
“We’re worried, but we’re still working on the magazines. What we’re trying to show to them is that they cannot arrest one person and expect that the organization will fall eventually,” she said.
Nguyen Quang A knows the Communist regimes repression tactics all too well. Nguyen, a businessman turned human rights activist, has been detained by police more than 20 times. His most consequential detention came in 2016, when he was on his way to a meeting with former US President Barack Obama. He was driven around and released just as Obama’s plane left the country.
“We had an excursion and I was forced to be the tour guide for the security officer,” he said.
Now in his 70s, Nguyen continues to be a target of state security forces. Last month, he was taken by ten police officers while on his way to having coffee with the US Ambassador.
“It was quite familiar to me,” he said of the incident.
While experts project that the pandemic would stunt the growth of weak democracies for years, there remains an argument for optimism, particularly when it comes to the “us versus them” narrative that repressive regimes depend on. According to the Bertelsmann report, the pandemic may cause divided populations to coalesce against a common enemy.
“It is quite conceivable that a comprehensive crisis could lead to increased solidarity within society, strengthening civil society self-help and cooperation against the grave social consequences of the pandemic,” says the report. ●
Christian Brazil Bautista has worked in both the United States and the Philippines, reporting and editing for The Real Deal, Digital Trends, Financial Times, Real Estate Weekly, Yahoo! Southeast Asia and Rappler.