A very, very bad precedent

By Reyshimar C. Arguelles

For the state to continue existing, it has to maintain institutions that legitimize its rule over the people. The army, police, courts, schools, and all other institutions that impose the values the state holds dear play an important role in this regard. But this role is not limited to teaching what is good and bad for everyone else. The implications are far more serious.

When the state itself is imperilled, it has to use force on the pretext of maintaining law and order, but it does so without a clear premise more or less. The threat of terrorism and disorder necessitate the mobilization of security forces whose task is to survey and neutralize the “enemies of the state.” But while the state purportedly welcomes criticism (even going so far as recognizing it as a vital facet for democratic life), there remains an absence of a rational criteria for determining who gets to be branded as an enemy.

Profiling terrorists and separating them from the average pleb who is critical about the current government is like comparing apples to oranges. Either way, everyone gets stuffed in a blender and made into an unholy juice for the state to gulp down.

With the Senate passing the Anti-Terrorism Law of 2020 on final reading last week, the Duterte administration seeks to improve the country’s capacity for internal security. In a Senate statement, Senator Ping Lacson sees the value that this law has in strengthening the country’s law enforcement structure and prosecuting those “who have committed, are about to commit, or are supporting those who commit terroristic acts” in almost the same way as the USA PATRIOT Act has sought to achieve under the second Bush administration.

Still reeling from the Marawi Siege that left an entire city in ruins, the Duterte administration has highlighted an urgent need to update our national security infrastructure, improving on the weaknesses of the previous Human Security Act of 2007. The new law has included noxious provisions allowing law enforcement entities to conduct extensive surveillance on suspected terrorists and detain suspects without a warrant for a 14-day period. The law also seeks to designate Regional Trial Courts as “Anti-Terror Courts” supposedly to expedite cases involving terror suspects.

If only this government was just as cautious in dealing with the threat the coronavirus poses. But of course, there is always a reason to place terrorism in the same category as a fatal outbreak. If anything, though, terrorism has the same characteristics as the black plague and governments will have to do what they can to contain and destroy this disease.

Perhaps, this is the logic that compelled the 19 senators who voted for the Anti-Terrorism Law. But it is clear that the law itself will penalize dissent in place of understanding why and how people are disenfranchised and drawn towards terrorist movements in the first place.

Indeed, the problem with anti-terrorism laws and all other draconian national security legislation is that they lead us into thinking that terrorism solely exists to undermine the state and discarding any form of serious discussion on why such threats exist in the first place. And this has always been the kind of situation the country has faced when the only rationale behind national security is sustaining the state machine as though it does not already have an exclusive right to use violence.

They also carry with it the risk of infringing civil liberties which are seen only as guaranteed rights instead of fundamental democratic conditions. Even if the Anti-Terrorism Law specifically penalizes law enforcement officials for abuse, there exist no criteria for determining what the state can and cannot do.

The law itself is nothing more than an iteration of the state’s power over its subjects, something that does not add any real value to national security. What we need the most is a counterterrorism policy that maintains a high-level of accountability and transparency and engages the actual needs communities. All other measures create a very bad precedent.