HUMAN rights watchdog Karapatan urged the Supreme Court to heed the calls to review the rules on the issuance of search warrants amid what the group described as an increasingly alarming pattern of killings and arrests of activists, political dissenters, and human rights defenders in the implementation of these warrants.
Indeed, not a few are alarmed that the issuance of search warrants by trial court judges have effectively become death warrants. The killings and arbitrary arrests of human rights defenders as well as the increasingly deadly raids on their homes and offices in the implementation of such warrants should be addressed. The Supreme Court must review its system on the issuance of search warrants, and they must take action now before more lives are lost.
Before the recent raids in Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, and Rizal on March 7, the issuance of search warrants have also led to the killings of nine indigenous Tumandok leaders as well as the arrest of 16 others in Capiz and Iloilo on Dec. 30 last year. Remember the search warrants which led to the arrests of 76 individuals, including in the raids in Manila and Negros on October and November 2019 as well as the in raids throughout Metro Manila on International Human Rights Day last year?
According to Court Administrator Jose Midas Marquez in a memo dated March 12, a total of 63 applications for search warrants to be served in different areas of the Southern Tagalog region were filed before the Manila RTC on March 1. The applications were heard by four judges in two days. Wow.
It is the duty of the Supreme Court to ensure that issuance of search warrants undergo rigorous scrutiny and questioning. Hearing 63 applications in two days already calls into the question the process in which these search warrants were issued, and not just how they were implemented by law enforcers during these raids.
On March 22, 139 lawyers led by the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers wrote to the Supreme Court to propose amendments to rules on the issuance and service of search warrants. The court now has the burden of heeding calls to review and appropriately amend its rules on the issuance of search warrants as well as on the issuance of protective writs in light of the use of these warrants to threaten infringe upon the lives, liberty, and security of individuals — particularly those of human rights defenders.
The clock is ticking, and every second of inaction that passes puts more and more people at risk. They must act now and heed our calls before it is too late.
