A time of innocence
THE idea that everyone is “innocent until proven guilty” forms the core of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but is much older than the declaration itself.
It has served us well for more than six centuries. It’s a presumption that’s been invoked in defense of the marginalized, including Jews and witches.
It has also served as one of the most powerful arguments against torture, wrote Kenneth Pennington of The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law (“Innocent Until Proven Guilty: The Origins of a Legal Maxim,” 2003).
Yesterday, citizens concerned about human rights marked the 68th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Human Rights. Among the principles they celebrated was the presumption of innocence, which granted all defendants “the absolute right to be summoned, to have their case heard in an open court, to have legal counsel, to have their sentence pronounced publicly, and to present evidence in their defense.”
Yet in the Philippines, the presumption of innocence has taken a beating these past five months.
President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on illegal drugs has persuaded some 727,600 drug users, according to police estimates, to surrender and seek help. Most of them are lucky enough to stay alive.
It is too late, however, for more than 2,000 persons killed in police operations and at least 3,500 others who fell in unsolved homicides. Last Wednesday, The New York Times ran photojournalist Daniel Berehulak’s story about how he documented 57 homicides during a 35-day visit to the Philippines.
His perfect photos terrify. Nearly all of them show civilians gunned down in Metro Manila.
One of the few photographs that did not center on a dead body showed two teenagers and a young girl huddled around three candles placed on a broken pavement in Pandacan.
A few days earlier, 15 masked men had arrived, dragged their uncle Joselito Jumaquio down an alley, yelled out at the neighbors to get back inside their homes, and fired six shots.
When the neighbors finally found the courage to go outside, they saw Jumaquio dead, a gun and a packet of shabu beside his handcuffed hands. “The police report called it a buy-bust operation,” Berehulak wrote.
All the photo’s shadows fail to hide the children’s grief. Berehulak wrote that what he saw in the Philippines “felt like a new level of ruthlessness” that shocked him even after having covered wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “They Are Slaughtering Us Like Animals” is one of the most painful stories I’ve read in this particularly trying year, but I recommend that you make the time to read it. Of course, the president’s most fervent supporters will tell us that many of those murdered should have thought of the lives they had ruined by peddling or using drugs. Maybe their pain, too, is real. But the fact remains that there is no credible effort on the part of law enforcers and other government officials to find out if the individuals who’ve been killed were, indeed, in the illegal drug trade. There is a strange kind of innocence— or is it, perhaps, indifference?— in those who believe that everyone who died had it coming to them, simply because some very powerful men said so.