February 21, 2021

This Week in Human Rights News

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Chad Booc, activist and teacher, arrested in the Philippines 

Sources: Rappler (1, 2, 3), Al Jazeera, The jfa Human Rights Journal

  • On Monday, Chad Booc, a 26-year-old computer science graduate, activist and volunteer teacher for Indigenous children was arrested along with six others without a warrant during a police raid at the University of San Carlos (USC) in Cebu City, Philippines, who was hosting Lumad children. 

  • The police accuse Booc and the six others of recruiting and training children to be communist combatants, and are calling their raid a “rescue operation”.

  • The Societas Verbas Divini (SVD) Philippines Southern province and USC, who provided temporary shelter and education to the displaced Lumad students on the university campus, released a joint-statement denying the students were being held captive. 

  • The Lumad students had fled their homes in the southern island of Mindanao due to armed conflict and had stayed longer than planned in Cebu due to the Covid-19 lockdown.

  • Chad Booc is known on social media (Twitter and Facebook) for posting about the increasing militarisation of Lumad communities.

  • He has been teaching at ALCADEV, a Lumad alternative school, for several years and has chronicled his experiences - ranging from school events and endemic Lumad culture, to forced community evacuations and death threats he received as a volunteer teacher - thus becoming a source for news on remote Lumad communities. 

  • Booc is among those who signed the 24th petition against the new Anti-Terror law, that punishes a broad list of crimes including inciting to commit terrorism and recruiting to a terror group.

  • The petition is currently being heard by the Supreme Court.

  • The anti-terror council has designated the Communist Party of the Philippines-New Peoples' Army (CPP-NPA) as terrorists after talks with the group collapsed.

  • Because of his social media presence and the information he is relaying, he has been “red-tagged multiple times as a terrorist recruiter”, and was previously arrested in 2017 for opposing martial law.

  • Red-tagging consists of accusing organisations of acting as “fronts” for the communist rebels.

  • Critics have accused President Rodrigo Duterte of using ‘communism’ as an excuse to crack down on any groups who oppose his administration’s policies.

  • Booc was previously arrested in 2017 for attending protests against martial law.

  • His latest arrest is part of an intensification of militarisation endured by Lumad communities. 

  • Human Rights Watch in the Philippines called the incident a “targeting of Indigenous peoples”, and Save Our Schools Network called it “pure harassment”.

  • Since 2020, the Lumad schools and its students have faced harassment, forced closures, illegal arrests, and aerial bombings - many of which Chad Booc documented. 

  • At least 178 schools have been shut down since 2016, thus depriving at least 5,500 Indigenous children of education. 

  • A 2020 Global Witness report said that at least 43 Philippine land-rights advocates, many of them from Lumad communities, were killed in 2019.

  • In October 2020, we platformed a powerful piece by Elizabeth Ruth Deyro, “How Indigenous education is militarised in southern Philippines”, in which Chad Booc had been interviewed.

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