News Roundup 25 March 2021
Mar 25, 2021 • 4 min Read
99.8K active cases as DOH records 8,773 new COVID-19 infections | PHILSTAR.COM – The Philippines on Thursday recorded 8,773 additional COVID-19 cases, bringing the total number of infections to 693,048.
- Active cases: 99,891 or 14.4% of the total
- Recoveries: 574, pushing total to 580,062
- Deaths: 56, bringing total to 13,095
Senate bill seeks to criminalize red-tagging | PHILSTAR.COM – Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon, a former justice secretary, wants to punish red-tagging state agents with up to ten years in prison and disqualification from public office. Drilon filed Senate Bill No. 2121, or an Act Defining and Penalizing the Crime of Red-tagging, on Wednesday. The bill defines red-tagging as the labeling, vilifying, branding, naming, accusing, harassing, persecuting, stereotyping, or caricaturing individuals, groups, or organizations as “state enemies, left-leaning, subversives, communists, or terrorists as part of a counter-insurgency or anti-terrorism strategy or program.” “Any state actor, such as a law enforcement agent, paramilitary, or military personnel,” guilty of perpetrating the acts mentioned above “shall suffer the penalty of imprisonment of ten (10) years and perpetual absolute disqualification to hold public office.” The debate over the criminalization of red-tagging has loomed large in recent months as the country experienced what Drilon, in his explanatory note for the bill, detailed as “an unprecedented rapid escalation of…the State’s malicious labeling and stereotyping of individuals or groups as communists or terrorists.” He cited Zara Alvarez, a rights worker whose name was included in the Department of Justice’s terror list before she was fatally shot by unidentified gunmen on Aug. 17, 2020. Drilon also recalled the case of Dr. Mary Rose Sancelan, the only physician in Guihulngan City, who was shot by an unidentified assailant on Dec. 15, 2020, along with her husband, after she figured on a list of 15 people accused of being members of the Communist Party of the Philippines. “Members of the legal profession were not spared from this systemic and calculated vilification as enemies of the State,” he added, citing the recent killings, attacks and red-tagging of human rights lawyers and judges.
Police in drug war operations had intent to kill – CHR report | INQUIRER.NET – The Philippine National Police used “excess, unreasonable” force and had the “intent to kill” suspects during drug-related operations, the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) found after looking into thousands of drug-related killings in the past four years of President Duterte’s antinarcotics campaign. Commissioner Gwendolyn Pimentel Gana told the Inquirer in recent interviews that the CHR had investigated nearly 3,300 extrajudicial killings (EJKs) in Metro Manila, Central and Southern Luzon resulting from police operations and vigilante killings between May 2016 and March 2021. Of the total, 1,912 people were killed in police operations, while 1,382 others died in attacks by unidentified assailants. Gana said they had based their initial findings in a report that would be made public in about a month on affidavits or statements of relatives of those who were killed in the police operations, as well as on police and autopsy reports.
OCTA: Too early to say if NCR+ bubble working | Manila Bulletin – OCTA Research fellow Dr. Guido David said the government should put more restrictions if the reproduction rate of COVID-19 cases will not decrease despite the imposition of a bubble setup in Metro Manila and other areas. The government has placed the National Capital Region (NCR) and the provinces of Rizal, Bulacan, Cavite, and Laguna under stricter general community quarantine status called as NCR Plus (NCR+) bubble from March 22 to April 4 to curb the rising number of COVID-19 cases. “After April 4, if we’re not seeing the numbers go down yet and we open up again, it’s gonna go back to the way things were last week or two weeks ago,” David said in an interview with CNN Philippines. “If the numbers are not decreasing fast enough, we may even need to impose additional restrictions,” he added. Based on OCTA’s projection last week, the daily COVID-19 cases in the country could reach up to 10,000 cases per day by the end of March. “Hopefully we will not reach those numbers because of the imposed NCR Plus bubble,” he said. The research fellow said it is still “too early” to say if the bubble is working as the reproduction number or the number of people that a COVID-19 positive individual can infect in NCR is still around 2.
