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Arroyo vows to improve human rights protection
The Philippines pledged on Saturday to accede to a UN protocol that aims to prevent torture and inhumane punishment of detainees by letting independent observers regularly visit jails and other places of detention.
- AP
- Published: 00:08 April 14, 2008
Manila: The Philippines pledged on Saturday to accede to a UN protocol that aims to prevent torture and inhumane punishment of detainees by letting independent observers regularly visit jails and other places of detention.
Human rights groups have urged the UN to take the Philippines to task for allegedly failing to prosecute soldiers suspected of involvement in a series of extrajudicial killings of left-wing activists.
President Gloria Arroyo will soon order officials to take steps to formalise her government's accession to the UN's Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and Cruel and Unusual Punishment, said Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita.
"We will soon have a new addition to our commitments to the human rights legal system," Ermita said in a statement issued in Manila.
Ermita was leading a government delegation in Geneva, where the UN Human Rights Council was conducting a periodic review of rights conditions in the Philippines.
Arroyo has said her government has taken steps to protect human rights, including investigating complaints and warning government forces to observe rights of crime suspects and accused insurgents who have been captured.
The Philippines adopted the main UN convention against torture in 1986, officials said.
Independent observers
The additional protocol, which was opened by the UN for accession in 2003, aimed to strengthen that convention by requiring governments to allow independent foreign and local observers to visit jails and other detention centres and to interview detainees. The observers should be given access to information needed to prevent torture.
It also calls on governments to establish independent national bodies to investigate complaints, and to introduce steps to prevent torture and other cruel methods of punishment.
The Philippines has long banned torture and inhumane punishment, but local human rights groups continue to sporadically accuse government troops and police of torturing and killing left-wing activists and insurgents.
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