President Marcos Jr., Release James Jazmines and Felix Salaveria, Jr.!

The Philippine state must exert all resources it can to locate activists James Jazmines and Felix Salaveria Jr., who are credibly believed to be abducted by state forces.

Both Jazmines and Salaveria, who support a variety of causes from labor and student activism to indigenous people’s rights, went missing last August 23 and 28 respectively. CCTV footage shows Salaveria being forcibly taken into a silver van by two men while other motorcycles served as lookouts. Witnesses and CCTV footage have placed a silver van and other vehicles of interest in Jazmines’s barangay around the date of his disappearance. The coordinated nature of the abductions, including surveillance efforts being suspected prior to them, strongly hint at the participation of state forces.

The inaction and silence on their case, as well as the cases of many other ‘desaparecidos’, is a dark stain on the record of Pres. Marcos Jr’s administration. According to rights group Karapatan, there have been 13 enforced disappearances, 53 frustrated extrajudicial killings, and 89 extrajudicial killings under his watch. That he has failed to take decisive action, or at the very least provide any assurances to the public, marks a grave failure to fulfill his basic obligation as president.

I echo the calls of the families of Salaveria and Jazmines, local and international right groups, for their immediate release. I express my support to any recourse they might take, including a potential writ of amparo petition before the Supreme Court. I fully support the urgent statement to Philippine authorities to set them free issued by my organization, the ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights – APHR.

President Marcos Jr., it is time to act decisively on this epidemic of disappearances and impunity! Control your security agencies and punish those responsible for these abductions.