53. Observe and report
Having media workers as official witnesses in drug raids is still problematic
Welcome back to Slow News Days, a now-and-then newsletter on journalism and journalism-adjacent topics in the Philippines.
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The Department of Justice is investigating an incident from earlier this month when National Bureau of Investigation personnel tried to harangue members of the media into signing an inventory of drugs that had supposedly been seized in a drug bust in Pasay City.
Having a member of the media as a witness in drug operations is meant for transparency, but reporters covering the raid said they wouldn’t sign because they weren’t there to see the operation itself.
Colleagues have signed as witnesses in the past, which, even if they had actually observed the operation and the inventory of the drugs seized, presented problems.
Some colleagues, for example, found themselves risking contempt of court for missing hearings when the cases go to court. Others were at risk of reprisal from drug suspects and of being accused of involvement in the drug trade themselves.
Worse is when colleagues sign inventories without even having been at the raid — notably in a Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency drug bust in Dumaguete City in 2020 that turned out to have been staged.
The regional trial court ordered the release of the people arrested by the PDEA, issued warrants of arrest against the agents involved in the fake operation, and began contempt proceedings against the media worker for “misleading the court, for making untruthful statements in their affidavits, and for directly impeding and degrading the administration of justice.”
Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla assured media that they have “have no duty to testify if you were really not part of [the operation],” saying also that potential witnesses from the media — the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act also includes barangay officials as mandatory witnesses — should have been at the raid itself.
The NBI has also apologized for the incident, adding that “while we try to observe standard operating procedures, given the technicalities in the conduct of field operations, the actions of some of our agents may have offended some media members.”
Remulla’s assurance and the NBI’s apology, while welcome, do not address the risk that including journalists among the mandatory witnesses under the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act puts media workers in.
Nor does it remove factors like the threat of losing access to law enforcement officials and official information for refusing to sign.
Based on input from colleagues who had been covering the “war on drugs”, the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines launched a signature campaign in 2018 to amend the anti-drugs law to remove journalists as mandatory witnesses altogether.
The petition eventually led to a bill being filed at the House to amend the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act that, unfortunately, was included in a consolidated bill along with other proposed amendments.
Among those proposed amendments was a series of dangerous presumptions, like, for example, that “any person found or is present within the immediate vicinity of the area of sale, trading, marketing, dispensation, delivery or distribution, is presumed to have been involved in the sale, trade or distribution of dangerous drugs, controlled precursors or essential chemicals.”
Justified objections to what critics called a “whittling down” of the Constitutionally-guaranteed presumption of innocence soon saw the bill — which had initially been approved by a vote of 118-11, lose steam and supporters at the House.
Although another bill has yet to be filed at the House, there seems little to gain from agreeing to sign a drug inventory.
The transparency that making media workers witnesses in drug raids can still be provided best through what the reporters ride along in raids and operations in the first place: reporting the operation as independent journalists.
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As lawmakers revive the discussion on changing the 1987 Constitution, Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Juan Ponce Enrile — most recently Senate president and less recently achitect of Martial Law — has proposed removing the ban on nuclear weapons, a Cold War-era proposal that would violate conventions that the Philippines is party to.
He also said that had the mothballed Bataan Nuclear Power Plant had been allowed to go operational, we would have nuclear wapons by now (which is, I guess, yet another argument against the power plant).Things are not going well for Rep. Arnolfo Teves Jr. (Negros Oriental), whom the House has suspended for not returning to the Philippines to face allegations related to political killings in the province and whose properties police have been serving search warants on.
One detail from the raids, which have expanded to his relatives’ properties, is how “an informant tipped off the police about a cache of high-powered firearms within the property’s compound, which led to the execution of search warrants.” That may well be true, but it’s the same narrative that has been used in arrests of activists in recent years.Meanwhile, a reminder from the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance in Australia on ChatGPT and other AI tools: “At its core, media professionals must have a say in decisions by publishers and broadcasters about integrating AI into workflows. And media outlets must be upfront with their audiences, the public and the communities they serve about how AI material is being incorporated into editorial output.”
Finally, from the Guardian, a very deep dive into the type of person some online trolls might actually be: My mother, the troll: ‘I think she lost sight of the McCanns’ humanity’