Nagbibilang na! Abogados’ group: Pinoys seeking vindication in Duterte’s final SONA

President Rodrigo Duterte will be addressing during his last state of the nation address (SONA) a people seeking vindication, the National Union of People’s Lawyers (NUPL) said on Monday (July 26).

With this, the NUPL warned Duterte not to expect a people made “numb to the language of violence and rendered submissive to the caprices of unchecked power.”

“Contrary to his expectations, the president shall be addressing a people not ready to move on and find closure in the twilight of his administration. Instead, he faces a people resolved to seek vindication – in the courts, in the ballot, in the streets, and even across the seas and in the horizons,” the group declared.

The NUPL said the SONA will be held in “the wake of thousands of extra-judicial killings prompted by this administration’s flagship program – the so-called war against drugs – the processes of the International Criminal Court continue to grind towards a scenario where the president may be held to account.”

The NUPL said these “transgressions continue to jar the national conscience and consciousness that individuals and organizations have devoted their efforts to pursue accountability measures for all the blood that has been shed, demonstrating that the president, beyond the polished halls of what is called the House of Representatives, shall address a raging people.”

“Despite the administration’s efforts to curtail civil liberties and crush dissent through authoritarian rants and draconian decrees and the pouring of billions of pesos into a McCarthyist task force, the jailing of political opponents, and the rapacious filing of trumped-up charges against activists, the president faces not a people cowed by fear, but a people with stronger imperatives to defy. For the five years spent weaponizing the law against opposition, he faces an aegis of human rights lawyers more committed than ever to the tenets of democracy,” it added.

The NUPL said Duterte won’t find during his SONA “a populace dazzled by his recitals of his administration’s purported accomplishments” but “a baffled people made more destitute under the government’s handling of the COVID-19 Pandemic.”

“Contrary to all the president’s expectations, his speech shall not be met by cheers and calls for his brand of leadership to continue, but by a chorus of jeers from a people who are starving for genuine change,” the group said.

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Source: Latest Politics News Today (Politics.com.ph)