An organization of human rights lawyers welcomed the ruling issued by the Office of the Ombudsman (OMB) which found retired Lt. Gen. Antonio Parlade Jr. and former Presidential Communications undersecretary Lorraine Marie Badoy guilty of “red-tagging.”
“The Decision implies that any reckless innuendo and gratuitous vitriol against human rights lawyers (and by extension, against activists and human rights defenders for that matter) to silence dissent, opposition or rights awareness, will not be countenanced and will be sanctioned one way or the other, sooner or later, in time,” National Union of Peoples' Lawyers (NUPL) Chairperson Edre U. Olalia said in a statement.
The statement was issued in response to the recent decision of the OMB which acted on the administrative complaint filed by the NUPL against former national security adviser Hermogenes Esperon Jr. and former National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) spokespersons Parlade and Badoy.
Though it dismissed the complaint against Esperon, the OMB found Parlade and Badoy guilty of conduct prejudicial to the best interest of the service for red-tagging the NUPL as “communist terrorists” or “fronts” of the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army-National Democratic Front of the Philippines (CPP-NPA-NDF).
With its ruling, the OMB reprimanded Parlade and Badoy for their actions when they were still with the NTF-ELCAC. Esperon was cleared of the administrative complaint.
Olalia admitted the NUPL has “mixed reactions” about the OMB’s ruling.
“While we did not achieve the full legal redress and it seems like a pyrrhic victory as it fell short of our plea for complete legal accountability (and considering that the Respondents are now officially out of public service), the Decision sustaining our legal procedural recourse, the finding of guilt for Conduct Prejudicial to the Interest of the Service and the categorical reprimand to Gen. Parlade and a certain Ms. Badoy can be viewed as a loud warning shot, as it were,” Olalia said.
“The OMB ruling also made a stern warning ‘that a repetition of a similar offense would be dealt with more severely,'" he stressed.