Human rights policy

Human rights policy

The legal basis for enforcing human rights standards has been continuously expanded in recent years. An important milestone in this development was the abolition of capital punishment in 2006 (as one of the first countries in Asia) dar. However, there is a lack of actual compliance with these norms. Again and again and it comes to serious human rights violations (so-called extrajudicial killings, bodily harm, kidnapping, torture, sexual abuse) that are often members of the police and military on the one hand and Insurgentengruppen (eg, the armed wing of the Communist Party and Muslim rebels) on the other hand blamed. President Aquino has reiterated its commitment to improve the human rights situation expressed by the fact that he was the former chairman of the Human Rights Commission for his justice minister.
The conditions in the overcrowded prisons are often bad and unworthy. There is a lack of clean water, food and health care. The justice system is overburdened, inefficient, under-funded and partially open to corruption, but has also taken important initiatives to strengthen human rights (eg the regulations for "writ of amparo" and "habeas data" in 2007). Made to suffer trials of long duration, sometimes with the burden of proof and a one-sided favoritism of witness evidence.
Still, so-called "extrajudicial killings" committed, even though the number of such killings in recent years declined. The legal clarification of reported cases is mostly very slow.
The European Commission and the Philippine government have carried out a project titled EP-JUST (EU-Philippine Justice Support Program) to strengthen the judicial sector in the Philippines, which runs until April 2011. 2012, a new EU program with human-rights focus ("Access to Justice") to start work.