By Jeffrey Damicog An organization of lawyers has vowed to get back at those in the government for human rights violations committed under the name of the enhanced community quarantine (ECQ). “For as soon as the dust settles, there will be an accounting and accountability,” assured the National Union of People’s Lawyers (NUPL) in a statement. “Every single duck walk, every prolonged exposure to the sun, every carrying of coffins, caging, show trials, nuisance investigations, arbitrary arrests and more importantly, the unacceptable failure to feed and care for the people when they needed a government most are memorialized in different forms and images, ready to be retrieved in a time of reckoning,” it said. In the meantime, the NUPL told the public it will “continue to equip the people with legal knowledge, competent advice and as prompt aid as possible to protect and defend their rights.” The group reminded the government that human rights should be upheld despite the implementation of the ECQ. “At this point, we should reiterate that the ‘rule of justice’ has never ceased to operate. Basic economic, social, political and civil rights have never been reduced to a mere enumeration of empty do's and dont's as what control-obsessed wielders of power, high and low, try to undermine,” NUPL said. “The lockdown and the pandemic are not the government’s ‘passes’ to sow a reign of terror, cultivate a climate of fear and blind obeisance, and commit human rights violations with impunity,” the group added. With this, the NUPL expressed disapproval over threats made by President Duterte to have a “martial law-like” implementation of the ECQ. “While threats of a martial law-like crackdown are certainly legally untenable and open to constitutional challenge and debate, this is something that should never be taken lightly as the administration's henchmen in uniform have already continued to cause human rights violations, silence critics or send them behind bars through non-use, misuse and abuse of the legal system,” the group said.