Noisemakers converge

“Sloppy work of the NUPL in the case was exposed by the Office of the Solicitor General, which noted that the case of alleged harassment to one of the petitioners happened before the President’s assumption of office.

Enemies of President Rody Duterte had discarded all pretensions in their vilification campaign against him as the yellow mob, white frocks and the communist fronts banded in the crimes against humanity case at the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague.

The militant National Union of People’s Lawyers (NUPL) had apparently taken over the black propaganda against President Rody Duterte through the ICC pleading.

It was lawyer Jude Sabio, a stooge of coup plotter Antonio Trillanes IV, who filed the original complaint, but lately Sabio and Trillanes, falling on hard times, have been quarrelling over their yellow loot, thus, endangering the demonization campaign.

The NUPL had made Rody the lone respondent in the ICC case to expose the communist front’s real intent.

The Red front then used as evidence the data gathered by Rise Up, a group backed by the Church and formed by erstwhile Palace officials under the term of yellow President Noynoy Aquino.

Used as proof were testimonies of family members of individuals slain supposedly in the conduct of the war on drugs although many have died in unrelated circumstances.

Part of Rise Up’s complaint was its arbitrary assessment of an alleged “government conspiracy to deflate and manipulate the number of people killed in anti-drug operations since Duterte came to power.”

“We allege that the PNP manipulated the numbers, definitions and categorizations of deaths in their attempt to shield the perpetrators and cover up the actual number of deaths,” the pleading said.

The other evidence against Rody was the yellow documentary titled “On the President’s Orders.”

The pleading said the film contained self-incriminating interviews with police officers in Caloocan City, a notorious battlefield in the drug war.

The weak case plus the representation of the biased NUPL will be enough to guarantee the defeat of the charge through an objective proceeding.

NUPL recently lost its writs of amparo and habeas data suit against the government.

The Court of Appeals said NUPL presented “vague or doubtful” grounds for its petition.

It was also Rody and a host of Cabinet men and security officials who were subjects of the NUPL allegations.

The sloppy work of the NUPL in the case was exposed by the Office of the Solicitor General, which noted that the case of alleged harassment to one of the petitioners happened before the President’s assumption of office and, in any event, the Chief Executive should be “excluded from the case in view of his presidential immunity from suit.”

The Solgen also pointed out that NUPL “failed to show that the purported (anti-communist) vandalism, flyers, posters, graffiti or anonymous list were perpetrated by government agents, under government direction, or with respondent’s participation.”

The group had complained of a vilification campaign against its members including the printing of posters and leaflets identifying them as members and sympathizers of a communist terrorist group. NUPL was first identified by the army as an enemy front organization in 2013.

Except for the change in the personalities in the complaint, it was still based on the trumped-up figures that Trillanes and Sabio submitted.

Rody’s spokesman Sal Panelo, in turn, has a strong case on Rise Up and NUPL in merely using the ICC case as a propaganda tool. He noted that the groups resorted to ICC because they failed to present proof of extrajudicial killings that resulted from the anti-narcotics campaign.

“If Rise Up has any basis for its submission then they should have the decency to honor the memory of those who died, and file actual complaints before our courts,” Panelo said.

The premise of the complaint against Rody was that he had a direct hand in the so-called extrajudicial killings in the war on drugs that NUPL is trying to prove when it can’t even point out in the amparo and habeas data filing the incidents that actually happened under Rody’s term.

Apparently, NUPL assuming the ICC case was meant to prolong the propaganda value of the ICC proceeding, which was put in danger after the spat between Sabio and Trillanes.