When Rights Die in Poverty and Silence

It is easy to believe human rights are being respected when the bullets stop flying.
It is harder to admit they are still being violated – in homes without water, in barangays without health workers, in classrooms too small for dreams.

The latest statement from the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) in Region 6 confirms this brutal truth: the most marginalized in Western Visayas – urban poor families, persons deprived of liberty, persons with disabilities, the elderly, and Indigenous Peoples – remain the most vulnerable to human rights abuses. Not because they are doing something wrong. But because they are poor.

As CHR Regional Director Atty. Jonnie Dabuco put it, “They have fewer resources, less power, so their chances of becoming victims of human rights violations are higher.” That is not just an observation. It is an indictment of a system that has normalized the link between poverty and abuse.

Human rights protection in our region continues to follow economic class lines. The richer you are, the more likely your rights are upheld – to be heard, to be safe, to be served. The poorer you are, the more you are ignored or punished for seeking help.

Yes, there has been a documented decline in civil and political rights violations such as red-tagging and extrajudicial killings. The change in the national government’s approach to the so-called anti-drug war – favoring arrests over killings – is one reason. This shift, while welcome, must not blind us to a deeper, quieter crisis.

Because while the guns may have fallen silent, the pain has not.

Today’s battleground for human rights is no longer just the streets but the social safety nets that don’t catch anyone. It is in the daily indignities endured by those who have been rendered invisible: the senior citizen left to walk kilometers to a clinic with no medicine, the PWD who cannot access a ramp in a government building, the Indigenous entrepreneur unable to register a business due to red tape and discrimination.

PROCESS Foundation-Panay executive director Lorena Navallasca was right to say that while civil and political rights are being discussed more openly, economic, social, and cultural rights (ESCR) are being treated as optional – luxuries that the poor must earn.

But dignity is not a reward. It is the starting point of justice.

The fact that CHR itself is raising the alarm should serve as a warning – and a challenge – to both local and national governments. Why is it that in 2025, decades after democracy was restored, those who need human rights protection the most still have the least access to it?

The answer lies in neglect – which, make no mistake, is also a form of abuse.

The marginalized are not only abused through state violence.

They are also abused by omission – by every failed promise to build a health center, every unimplemented ordinance on disability access, every barangay budget that forgets the elderly, every provincial plan that leaves Indigenous Peoples landless.

The most dangerous thing about this neglect is that it’s quiet.

It does not create headlines. It creates hunger.

It does not trend on social media. It traps people in silence.

It does not get condemned in the halls of Congress.

It happens in the shadows – and stays there.

But we will not stay silent.

There is hope – not in waiting for top-down solutions, but in expanding bottom-up pressure.
Hope lives in community-based paralegal work, in barangays that pass inclusive policies, in youth movements that demand social justice, in local media that cover not just crimes but the consequences of state inaction.

We owe our most vulnerable not just protection from abuse, but protection from being forgotten.

Because to neglect them is not just a policy failure. It is a moral one.