Islamist groups including the Abu Sayyaf terrorist organization have killed or wounded more than 1,700 people in the Philippines since 2000, Human Rights Watch said in a report released yesterday.
The rights watchdog said that the toll in the Philippines had surpassed the number of casualties for the same period in Indonesia, including in the 2002 Bali bombings.
"Extremist armed groups have spread terror among civilians in the Philippines," said John Sifton, senior researcher on terrorism and counterterrorism at Human Rights Watch.
"They have bombed buses carrying workers, food markets where people were shopping, airports where relatives were waiting for loved ones and ferry boats carrying families," he said.
The rights group's 28-page report, Lives Destroyed: Attacks on Civilians in the Philippines, details bombings, kidnappings, executions and shootings mostly in Mindanao, Basilan, Jolo and other southern islands.
The group criticized the Philippine government for not prosecuting those responsible for attacks, saying that although numerous suspects had been arrested, very few had been successfully brought to trial.
The rights group also criticized new counter-terrorism laws that it said contained "dangerous over-broad provisions that violate human rights standards and broaden the scope of government power to hold terrorism suspects indefinitely."
"The Philippines doesn't need a new abusive counterterrorism law," Sifton said.
"The government isn't using the laws it already has, so why does it need new provisions that violate human rights?" he asked.
The rights group also called on the international community to exert more pressure on the Philippine government and Muslim leaders to try to put an end to the violence.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
RSS