Philippines: more legal action against labour activists
Wednesday, 24 June 2009 23:15
Authorities in the Philippines are abusing their legal system as a means to suppress workers' rights. A new court case against 33 labour-rights activists and factory workers is politically motivated, aiming to suppress labour rights in the country.
Support the Filipino activists: write to the Filipino embassy in your country to demand the case against these 33 labour activists is dropped and the campaign of violence and intimidation against them is ended.
The workers, most of whom are women, are officials and members of two active labour unions in garment industries in Cavite, a province just south of the capital Manila. In September 2006, they organized a strike to protest against the factories' refusal to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement with the unions. However, after only two days, the peaceful strikes were violently dispersed by local police forces and private security agents, who attacked the strikers with clubs and other weapons. Dozens of workers were injured as a result.After ten further months of strikes amid continuing violence, a group of uniformed and masked men with firearms entered the heavily guarded factory compounds, holding some of the strikers at gunpoint and making death threats against them.
Following the violence, both unions issued criminal charges against the police and security guards. Around the same time, the police also filed criminal charges against 33 labour activists, accusing them of violence on the same occasion. Although the case against the police is still being investigated by the prosecutor of Cavite province, the same authority has issued arrest warrants for the unionized workers.
The international community is currently putting pressure on the Filipino government to act against the large number of extra-judicial killings of political dissidents in the country. The authorities, especially elements from the military and police force, are widely seen as being behind these killings.
The arrest warrants come at a time when the authorities appear to have changed tactics, increasingly using the Filipino justice system as an instrument to suppress dissent, as in the case of labour-rights activist and lawyer Remigio Saladero Jr., who faces arrest over a murder charge that is widely seen as trumped up by the authorities.
(http://www.cleanclothes.org/philippine-labour-rights-lawyer-faces-new-round-of-false-charges )
Support the Filipino activists: write to the Filipino embassy in your country to demand the case against these 33 labour activists is dropped and the campaign of violence and intimidation against them is ended.
