Even without an anti-terror law, teachers have been red-tagged not just by state forces but with the support of the entire mechanism of the Philippine government, the 31st petition against the anti-terror law told the Supreme Court.

Teachers, professors and members of the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) filed the petition before the Supreme Court on Tuesday, September 1, saying they “have been subjected to the worst forms of repression even before the passage of the Anti- Terrorism Law.”

The petition documented numerous instances of surveillance involving repeated visits by the police to school authorities demanding a list of ACT members in their faculties or staff.

The manner by which the police tried to obtain these information were considered “interrogation,” said the petition, adding that cops invoked “orders from their superiors” in the absence of a written authorization.

The police leadership would later deny the surveillance, yet it fired cops accused to have leaked the memorandum to surveil ACT teachers. 

 Major General Antonio Parlade Jr, the military’s Southern Luzon Command chief and a spokesperson of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAF), has publicly tagged ACT as a communist front.

This culminated in a multi-agency report submitted to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in May 2020 calling ACT a “Communist Party of the Philippines-created and led above-ground or front mass organization and institution.”

The report, which had inputs from different government agencies, was published by the Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO).

Red-tagged

In that matrix presented to the international community, more legitimate organizations, including established party-list groups such as Gabriela and Kabataan, and recognized think tank IBON Foundation, were tagged as communist fronts.

“It only bolsters the fact that the State intends to use the Anti-Terrorism Law to repress, persecute, and prosecute activist teachers and their organizations,” said the petition.

Teachers feared that under the threat of the anti-terror law, they would surrender their academic freedom and be prevented from teaching materials that would be labeled as subversive.

Section 45 of the anti-terror law lists the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) and the Department of Education (DepEd) as support groups of the anti-terror council (ATC). Other petitioners from the academe fear this might lead into changes of curriculums where repression would be institutionalized.

“Other academics who would find their researches valuable and thus utilize those in their classes or cite them in their own writings, could also be terrorist-tagged, while young researchers who are thinking of doing similar critical researches would also find their aspirations hampered if not totally hindered,” said the petition.

“The anti-terrorism act’s draconian provisions trample upon academic freedom, and consequently, higher education as we know it,” the petition said. – Rappler.com