Findings of the June 2-15 2006 International Fact-Finding Mission (IFFM) on Agrarian Reform Related Human Rights Violations
First Part | Second Part
he IFFM took place from June 2-15, 2006 in Bondoc Peninsula, Western Visayas and Southern Mindanao. The investigation covered 18 landholdings and three special cases of human rights violations, including the murder of UNORKA General Secretary Enrico Cabanit, the murder of TFM
organizer Rico Adeva, and the victims of chemical poisoning in the commercial banana farm belt.
The IFFM’s international participants included representatives of the transnational peasant movement La Via Campesina (LVC), the international human rights
organization Foodfirst Information and Action Network (FIAN), the international advocacy network Land Action Research Network (LRAN), the Philippine solidarity group in the Netherlands Filippijnengroep Nederlands (FGN), Xaverian Missionaries (SX), and the Transnational Institute (TNI), an international network of scholar-activists.
The Mission found that, in the cases covered by the IFFM, big landowners and their employees are running amok of Philippine law and international law, and with complete impunity, are engaged in a wide range of criminal activity that seriously undermines rural poor people’s effective access to their human rights. In the cases covered by the IFFM, the Philippine state is failing abjectly to
fulfill its obligations to respect, protect and fulfill the human rights of the rural poor population, as signatory to the various relevant international human rights law conventions.
In many instances, in the cases covered by the IFFM, government forces, such as local units of the Philippine National Police (PNP) and of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), were found to be siding with big landlords and thus actively involved in violating the rights of agrarian reform petitioners and agrarian reform beneficiaries, and thus
failing to respect their rights. Rather than keeping peace and order, such government forces were found to be involved in cases of killings, harassment and forced evictions.
In the cases covered by the IFFM, the Philippine state is also failing to protect
the human rights of agrarian reform petitioners and agrarian reform beneficiaries from crimes being committed against them by third parties, such as powerful landlords and their employees and other non-state armed groups, and failing to prosecute the perpetrators.
Finally, in the cases covered by the IFFM, the Philippine state is also failing to
fulfill the human rights of tenants and farmer workers by not fully and completely redistributing land to them according to their rights under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law (CARL). In many instances, it was unclear from their actions whether the intent of various relevant government agencies was to help peasant petitioners and beneficiaries of the agrarian reform to acquire their legal land rights in reality, or whether it was instead to help big landlords to evade the law and to hold onto their lands by whatever means possible.