Jailing a foreigner
The Sisters of Our Lady of Sion nun who was “invited for questioning” (translation: arrested) by elements of the Bureau of Immigration (BI) for allegedly participating in rallies here has been released after almost 24 hours of detention. The official reason was that Immigration officials had determined that the charge against her needs a further look. In short, she was so far not found to be violating Philippine laws.
The case involving 71-year-old Patricia Fox, an Australian nun, caught local and international attention for a number of reasons. First, she is a foreigner from Australia. Second, she is old and frail. Third, she is a nun and even is a regional coordinator of an international religious congregation. Third, her only fault was that she participated in rallies (her papers as a missionary here are in order).
The fourth reason was the one stated by no less than President Rodrigo Duterte himself, that he was the one who had Fox investigated (but not necessarily detained, he said). That Fox would get the attention of the president is an interesting side bar.
Earlier, Immigration officials also barred from entering here a socialist party official from Europe who had intended to join a gathering by the militant group Akbayan in Cebu City. That actually had me thinking somebody in the immigration bureau was playing hawkish and buttering himself or herself up to the president. It has turned out that it was the president himself who is clamping down on foreign dissent.
“Look, I’m addressing to the Filipino nation,” he said in his speech during the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) change of command rites. “I can swallow, I can take all attacks from the Lumads, to the highest religious orders of all sorts, from my brother Moro, from the military, from everybody.
Ang hinihingi ko lang, you’re a Filipino. You are entitled, really, to criticize...Pero kung insultuhin ako, and in the cloak of being just a Catholic priest, and you are a foreigner, who are you?”
Fox’s arrest is therefore incidental to the government’s intention, which is to send a strong message to foreigners who are joining local protests against the policies of the Duterte administration. Which in turn is an admission of how telling international criticism of some of the Duterte administration’s policies has become.
It might not be coincidental that a couple of weeks ago the president has threatened to arrest Gambian Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), if she sets foot in the country. The ICC is continuing to look into the case filed against the president for the killings attributed to the war against illegal drugs even if the Philippines has formally withdrawn from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
The president has been successfully fending off accusations of human rights violations starting when he was Davao City mayor and until now that he is leading the country. That is one issue that he is obviously very sensitive to, one proof of that being the fate that befell Sen. Leila de Lima. I don’t see any reason for the president to act differently with regards to his foreign critics.