Freedom in the World 2001 - Philippines

2001 Scores

Status: Free
Freedom Rating: 2.5
Civil Liberties: 3
Political Rights: 2

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Philippines received a downward trend arrow because of increasing civil conflict in the southern Mindanao region and credible allegations of high-level official corruption.

Overview

Following months of widespread allegations of cronyism and incompetence against President Joseph Estrada, at year's end the senate was conducting an impeachment trial over charges that Estrada received $11 million in kickbacks from tobacco taxes and illegal gambling rackets. Having publicly rebuked Estrada, Vice President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was preparing to take power should the senate muster the two-thirds majority needed to convict the president.

The Philippines won independence in 1946 after 43 years under United States rule and occupation by the Japanese during World War II. The country slid into dictatorship in 1972, when the elected president, Ferdinand Marcos, declared martial law to circumvent a constitutional two-term limit. Following a blatantly rigged election in late 1985, street protests and the defection of key military leaders and units ended Marcos's rule in February 1986. His opponent in the election, Corazon Aquino, took office.

Aquino consolidated some democratic gains, but faced at least six coup attempts by reactionary army factions and other opponents. Under her successor, former army chief of staff Fidel Ramos, the government ended power shortages and weakened somewhat the considerable political and economic influence of large, family-owned monopolies. Ramos's economic liberalization policies helped increase the rate of gross domestic product (GDP) growth but widened income disparities.

With the popular Ramos ineligible to run for a second term, Vice President Joseph Estrada won 46.4 percent of the vote and defeated seven other candidates in the May 11, 1998 presidential elections. While Estrada had campaigned on a pro-poor platform, his opponents denounced him as a hard-drinking philanderer with close ties to Marcos-era tycoons. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, a senator and economist, won the separate vice presidential balloting. In concurrent house elections, Estrada's Struggle for a Democratic Philippines party won 110 seats and the LAKAS-National Union of Christian Democrats came in second with 50.

The new administration established several antipoverty programs targeted toward Estrada's lower class constituency. However, by mid-1999, Estrada's approval ratings had dropped sharply amid a short-lived, controversial proposal to amend the constitution to further open the economy to foreign investment, criticism of the president's close ties with tycoons, whose business interests allegedly received preferential treatment from the administration, and allegations that Estrada set policy during late-night drinking sessions.

Although corruption allegations had dogged his administration ever since it took office, the first charge of actual criminal wrongdoing against Estrada came in October 2000, when a provincial governor alleged that the president had received tax and gambling kickbacks. The case went to the senate after the house of representatives impeached Estrada on November 13, 2000, on charges of bribery, graft, betrayal of public trust, and violation of the constitution. While the president denied the allegations, Vice President Arroyo and several other senior administration officials and congressional supporters called for Estrada to resign. Arroyo also formed a shadow cabinet and drafted an agenda for its first 100 days in office. While a broad coalition of middle class, business, and church interests also called for Estrada's resignation, polls suggested that he remained popular among poorer Filipinos.

The political maneuvering occurred as some of the worst fighting in the southern Mindanao region since the 1970s killed hundreds of soldiers and members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and Abu Sayyaf, two leading Islamic separatist groups in predominantly Muslim Mindanao. The fighting also displaced tens of thousands of civilians. Separately, the government made little progress in negotiations with leaders of the now-limited Communist insurgency that peaked in the 1970s.

Analysts said the political and military developments and an expanding budget deficit undermined investor confidence in the country. GDP grew only 3.4 percent in the first half of the year. By October, the peso had fallen to a 33-month low against the dollar and the stock market had fallen 30 percent since January.

Political Rights and Civil Liberties

Filipinos can change their government through elections. The 1987 constitution vests executive power in a president who is directly elected for a single six-year term. The congress consists of a senate with 24 directly elected members and a house of representatives with 201 directly elected members and up to 50 more appointed by the president.

While elections are generally free, some fraud and intimidation, and at least 47 election-related deaths, marred the 1998 national and local elections. Corruption, cronyism, and influence-peddling are widely considered to be rife in business and government. The World Bank reported in June that corruption had cost the Philippines an estimated $48 billion in the 20 years to 1997, and continued to cost the government $47 million per year, despite some progress. The Berlin-based Transparency International's 2000 Corruption Perceptions Index ranked the Philippines in a tie with India for 69th place out of 90 countries, with a score of 2.8 on a 0-to-10 scale. The least-corrupt country, Finland, received a 10. Many recent political and economic reforms have barely reached the countryside, where local clans and landowners hold considerable power.

While the country's overall human rights situation has improved considerably under elected governments, in recent years severe human rights violations have occurred in the context of the Islamic-based insurgencies in Mindanao. Police, soldiers, and local civilian militias continued to be accused of committing extrajudicial killings and disappearances during counterinsurgency operations. Civilians fleeing a government offensive on Jolo Island in September told local journalists that the army had carried out indiscriminate bombings as well as summary executions, arbitrary arrests, and "disappearances" of suspected Abu Sayyaf sympathizers, according to Amnesty International. Along with Communist insurgents elsewhere in the Philippines, the MILF and Abu Sayyaf continued to be implicated in cases of extrajudicial execution, torture, and arbitrary detention. Including killings by police of ordinary criminal suspects, the official Commission on Human Rights said it investigated a total of 185 extrajudicial killings in 1999 by security forces and insurgents.

At the height of fighting in May, roughly 600,000 out of Mindanao's population of 15 million people were displaced. Some 80,000 people fled their homes in Jolo Island during the army's September offensive, which freed some of the dozens of local and foreign hostages kidnapped for ransom during the year by Abu Sayyaf. While many villagers undoubtedly fled on their own accord, in recent years the MILF and Abu Sayyaf have forcibly evacuated civilians from their homes. Adding to the civilian misery, suspected Islamic separatists killed dozens of people in bomb attacks on buses, marketplaces, and other civilian targets in Mindanao during the first half of the year.

The insurgencies in Mindanao occur in the context of complaints by the Moros, or Muslims who live primarily in Mindanao, of economic and social discrimination by the country's Christian majority. A 1998 Asian Development Bank survey reported that Muslim-majority provinces in Mindanao lag behind other Mindanao provinces on most development indicators. Critics alleged that a semiautonomous government, created under a 1996 peace accord that ended a 24-year insurgency by the Moro National Liberation Front, has few real powers and has made little progress in stimulating economic development in the four Mindanao provinces it nominally controls.

Despite some improvements in recent years, police continued to be accused of arbitrary detention and torture of ordinary criminal suspects. Taking advantage of the country's weak rule of law, security forces are reportedly often involved in extortion schemes, the drug trade, and illicit logging. While guarding private businesses in the countryside, civilian militias often violate the rights of local residents with near impunity.

While the judiciary is independent, courts continued to be understaffed, heavily backlogged, and rife with corruption. In practice, poor people often have little recourse under the law, while wealthy and powerful Filipinos frequently manipulate judges. Prison conditions are poor and dangerous.

The private press continued to be outspoken, although newspapers often resort to innuendo rather than do investigative reporting. In the countryside, illegal logging outfits, drug traffickers, and guerrillas occasionally harass and intimidate journalists. In the most serious incidents, gunmen have killed several journalists in recent years. Nongovernmental human rights organizations continued to be active, although in recent years local authorities have occasionally harassed activists.

Freedom of religion is respected in this predominantly Roman Catholic country. Muslims are underrepresented in senior government positions and politics. Constituting 18 percent of the population, indigenous people face occasional reprisal attacks during army counterinsurgency operations, societal discrimination, and displacement from ancestral lands by commercial projects. The government has been slow to implement a 1997 act designed to increase the amount of land held by the indigenous population. On several occasions, the Estrada administration forcibly displaced squatters from illegal urban settlements in order to clear the way for development projects, often without offering relocation as mandated by law.

Domestic violence, rape, violence in the context of prostitution, and trafficking of Filipino women abroad for the purpose of prostitution continued to be major problems. The government has made some efforts to curb trafficking by cracking down on illegal recruitment of women and discouraging employment migration. Women have made gains in educational opportunities, but still face private sector employment discrimination. The country has more than 100,000 street children and tens of thousands of child prostitutes. The Commission on Human Rights said in 1999 that the Communist New People's Army was increasingly recruiting child soldiers.

Unions are independent but have brought relatively few workers into collective bargaining agreements. The International Labor Organization has criticized laws mandating arbitration for labor disputes in "essential" industries, authorizing penalties for strikes deemed illegal, and placing restrictions on the right of government workers to strike and bargain collectively. The law also places some restrictions on private sector workers' right to strike. Private sector employers often physically harass and intimidate union organizers, forcibly break strikes, and violate minimum wage standards. Many of these violations, along with sexual harassment, are reportedly most common in export-processing zones.