Palace assures no witch hunt vs teachers

MALACAÑANG on Monday denied the existence of a government policy to place suspected left-leaning teachers under constant police surveillance.

The Palace issued the statement after the militant Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) condemned the alleged police profiling of its officers and members in various parts of the country.

“Definitely the policy is not to [place] teachers [under constant surveillance]. The President loves the teachers,” Presidential Spokesman and Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Salvador S. Panelo assured at a Palace briefing, even as he stated that it is considered “natural” for law enforcers to monitor activities, which they find “illegal or irregular.”

“Because if you are doing certain illegal acts or you are identified with the Left which is now considered, I mean the organization—the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army—as a terrorist group, then there is something to fear if you are identified with that group,” he said.

“If you are not doing anything, why should you be afraid?” Panelo added. But in a separate television interview, he said, ACT is just being “paranoid.”

On Sunday ACT claimed that the police are making the rounds in schools and offices of the Department of Education (DepEd) to press education officials for an inventory of all ACT members under their jurisdiction.

“Police officers who have spoken to school heads either present or refer to PNP [Philippine National Police] memoranda ordering ‘all concerned’ to submit a list of all ACT members in every school, citing previous memoranda from PNP Intelligence departments and the upcoming May 2019 elections as bases for the order. The operations appear to be of a nationwide scale and points to the top PNP leadership as the foremost source of the order as we received similar reports from our members in Manila, Malabon, Las Piñas, Zambales, Bulacan, Rizal, Mindoro, Sorsogon, Agusan del Sur, among others,” the ACT statement said.

“This is a grossly illegal and an unconstitutional attack on our collective right to free expression and right to self-organization,” it added. The group said they are a legitimate teachers’ organization with a long history of service to professional teachers, education support personnel and the Filipino people in general.

“Thus, the PNP’s concerted national scheme to single out ACT and extract a list of all its members from principals and other school officials is a clear violation of the constitutional right to self-organization, freedom of expression and assembly, and right to privacy. It also violates the Magna Carta for Public School Teachers, and all the related laws, orders, and issuances which protect our right to self-organization and trade union rights in both public and private schools,” the statement said.

The group also urged DepEd officials to take a stand against the scheme and to not allow the agency to be used by the police to violate teachers’ rights.

“Rather than waste its time on intimidating and harassing legitimate teachers’ organizations, the PNP should instead focus on apprehending big drug lords, plunderers, humanrights violators, etc,” the group said.