Philippine human rights alliance Karapatan on 9 March welcomed the dismissal by the Quezon City Regional Trial Court of illegal possession of firearms charges against trade union organizer Dennise Velasco, who was arrested on 10 December 2020 along with six others social activists. Among those arrested with Velasco were fellow trade union organizer Rodrigo Esparago and Manila Today editor Lady Ann Salem, whose cases were dismissed by a Mandaluyong court on 5 February 2021.
Both courts voided the search warrants which led to the arrests due to the warrants’ infirmities and lack of evidence.
Karapatan took the occasion to condemn anew Quezon City Executive Judge Cecilyn Burgos-Villavert for the issuance of the warrants against the seven activists. According to Karapatan Deputy Secretary General Roneo Clamor, the search warrants were “based on concocted lies such as fabricated testimonies of so-called witnesses and confidential informants”.
Other search warrants issued by Executive Judge Burgos-Villavert had already been quashed by various courts, including those against Alexander and Winona Birondo, former staff members of the NDFP peace negotiations panel, and John Milton Lozande, Secretary General of the National Federation of Sugar Workers.
In rapid succession, Burgos-Villavert approved 58 search warrants which the Armed Forces of the Philippines and Philippine National Police used in the simultaneous ransacking of the offices of community organizations and houses of political activists in Bacolod City on 29 October 2019 and in Manila on 30 October and 5 November 2019. Security forces arrested 57 activists and 14 others in Bacolod while the Manila break-ins resulted in the arrest of five activists.
Meanwhile, Karapatan decried the appointment by President Rodrigo Duterte of yet another “search warrant factory” executive judge, Vice Executive Judge Lorenzo Dela Rosa, as associate justice of the Supreme Court. Karapatan revealed that Dela Rosa issued the search warrants which led to the murder of Emmanuel Asuncion and the illegal arrests of Elizabeth Camoral and Esteban Mendoza during the Bloody Sunday raids of 7 March 2021 in the Southern Tagalog region. Earlier, Dela Rosa also issued the warrants which resulted in the killing of Roy Giganto and eight indigenous Tumandok leaders and the arrest of 17 others during the gruesome raids conducted by AFP and PNP forces in Panay Island on 30 December 2019.
Karapatan’s Clamor asserted that the subsequent quashing of Dela Rosa’s warrants against at least five of the Tumandok and the filing of murder charges against some of the policemen involved in the Tumandok killings are “damning indictments of Dela Rosa’s bogus search warrant factory”.