THERE was a fair measure of irony—unintended, we are sure—when Senator Leila de Lima described why she was traveling to the United States and Germany this month.
“Both visits are very important to me because as a senator, I will have a chance to speak before influential world leaders and global thinkers on raising awareness and support for human rights, an advocacy I am passionate about,” De Lima said in a statement.
The senator’s press release does not say what award she is accepting in the United States, but says she will be in Germany to speak before the Annual Conference on Cultural Diplomacy, which focuses this year on promoting global human rights.
The itinerary matches the image that the senator has tried to project all these years, in offering herself to the public as a staunch and courageous defender of human rights.
There is a jarring note, however, in the senator’s well-cultivated human rights image.
We speak, not only of the complaint filed against her before the Senate ethics committee for advising a witness to go into hiding to avoid testifying before the House of Representatives, or the criminal charges she is facing over allegations that she accepted payoffs from incarcerated drug lords when she was still Justice secretary.
We do not even speak of the affair to which she has admitted, with her driver and bodyguard, who has testified before Congress that he accepted millions of pesos in drug payoffs on her behalf when he served as her bag man.
Senator De Lima denies all these allegations and says she will face them squarely in a court of law, a possibility that looms large, now that cases have actually been filed against her.
What we refer to today is De Lima’s selective protection of human rights when she was still Justice secretary, particularly when she was in charge of prosecuting the enemies of her patron, President Benigno Aquino III.
Chief among these was former President Gloria Arroyo, who was deprived of her liberty for four years over charges that neither De Lima nor her prosecutors ever proved.
Where was De Lima, we want to know, when the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found Mrs. Arroyo’s continued detention arbitrary and illegal under international law?
In that October 2015 opinion, the UN body also urged the Philippine government to reconsider Mrs. Arroyo’s bail plea, “in accordance with the relevant international human rights standards.”
We do not recall what the self-proclaimed champion of human rights did at the time—but we are certain she did not come to the defense of those same rights that she now claims to so passionately advocate today.
Under siege, De Lima today cries out against what she describes as her persecution—neglecting to say that not too long ago, she was on the other side of the fence, wielding state power to persecute the Aquino administration’s political enemies.
When Senator De Lima portrays herself as the golden protector of human rights, the public would do well to examine her track record. Chances are, they will see that this “champion” of human rights is much like Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, built with feet of clay.