The Saga of the Philippines' Human Rights Victims' Claims Board
The agency that was supposed to exist for only two years later rejected tens of thousands of claims and awarded just a few. Why?
The logo of the Human Rights’ Claims Board as featured on its Facebook account.
(Some names have been changed to protect their privacy and some corrections have been made by several board members who were interviewed for this piece. This piece was submitted as part of a writing grant in 2022 that was cut short during the same year.)
The name on the report looked familiar.
This is why Jacob (not his real name) examined it again.
The document, which was already several decades old, indicated that the person suffered abuse in an incident that took place in the mid-1970s, a period when Martial Law was in effect all over the Philippines.
Sometime in 2014, 40 or so years after the incident, that same person sought compensation from the Human Rights Victims' Claims Board (HRVCB), a now defunct body that, among others, gave financial reparations to human rights victims of the Marcos dictatorship.
But the board — where Jacob worked as a paralegal at that time — denied the person's claim.
The board said that the claim had no basis because it had no written testimonies from witnesses, no official or verified reports that the person was present during the incident, and no corroborating evidence whatsoever that the person ever suffered abuses at all. Without any proof, the person wasn't entitled to receive anything from the board, even if what he was saying actually took place.
But Jacob's discovery changed all that.
As a paralegal, it was Jacob's job to conduct research and investigate details contained in claim applications filed at the board, including those that seemed to be unsubstantiated.
His work involved combing through old newspapers and fact-finding reports of organizations such as the Task Force Detainees of the Philippines and Amnesty International. Jacob also looked at old documents detailing troop movements of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, reports from police stations in several parts of the country, relevant periodicals at the University of the Philippines Main Library, and even declassified information from the United States Embassy in Manila. Information contained in these documents — which may include reports of massacres or military clashes — could help prove the claims of human rights victims.
"[In 2014], many of these documents have not been scanned and digitized," said Glenda T. Litong, one of the board's nine members. "The paralegals worked really hard because the research was painstaking."
One paralegal took it harder than the others. She began to dream about the murders and massacres indicated in the claims submitted to the board. She quit not long after.
For his part, Jacob stayed up all night for days after stumbling upon the document.
After all, at stake wasn't just a simple oversight on the part of the board. It was the possibility that the person may just be one of the estimated 100,000 victims of the Marcos dictatorship. It was also another opportunity for the State to admit its role in these atrocities and award damages to those who were illegally detained and arrested, tortured, raped, murdered, and forced to disappear from September 1972 until February 1986.
Reparation law's two-year deadline 'tied government's hands'
When Jacob approached Atty. Litong bearing new evidence about a claim that the board denied, she didn't think twice about scheduling a meeting to redeliberate the case.
But that's as far as her memory of the case went.
Litong, who was part of the board's first division that previously denied the claim, no longer remembers whether the board en banc upheld or reversed its ruling after the case was deliberated again.
It wasn't just because the reparations process already took place eight years before she was interviewed for this piece. It was also because of the overwhelming amount of the work involved and the short time required to complete it.
The Human Rights Victims' Claims Board (HRVCB) was duty-bound to either grant or deny a claim filed by more than 75,730 applicants, all within its two-year existence from May 2014 to May 2016. (The deadline would later be extended by another two years when the law creating it was amended.)
The so-called "sunset clause" was included in Republic Act 10368 — the law that created the board — because legislators were guided by a 1997 ruling issued by the US Federal District Court of Hawaii. The class suit filed by 9539 human rights victims was awarded two billion dollars to be collected from the estate of the late president Ferdinand E. Marcos, whose family members and cronies stole an estimated $10 billion from the Philippine government.
Using this verdict, lawmakers estimated that those submitting claim applications to the board would only reach 20,000, or roughly twice the number of claimants in Hawaii. Based on this figure, legislators also said that the whole reparations process would only take two years.
The website of the Project Nameless aims to honor activists and martyrs of different political persuasions, many of whom are have never been recognized.
"When you look at the legislative proceedings, the basis was the Hawaii suit," said Jacqueline V. Mejia, who was the executive director of the Commission on Human Rights right before she joined the board as a member of the second division. "But because of the number of claims we received, two years would not be enough for us to be able to finish our processes. We had to ask Congress to extend it."
Given that limited time, the board theoretically had to issue 102 or so resolutions a day everyday for two years, just to decide on the 75,730 cases. The resolutions were decided upon by the division, not the individual members. As a result, each division was estimated to have issued decisions on roughly 25,000 claims.
The board, as a whole, was assisted by an initial staff of 14 lawyers, paralegals, and support personnel. (In comparison, the National Bureau of Investigation, which has 2,000 personnel, conducted 35,569 investigations in 2021, according to the Department of Justice's statistical digest for the same year.)
The government "didn’t know how much time or resources was necessary [for] a law involving a State responsibility that the Philippines has never seriously undertaken before," said international expert Ruben Carranza in an email.
The sunset clause "unnecessarily tied the hands of government in implementing the reparations law," said Carranza, a senior expert on reparations and war crimes at the International Center for Transitional Justice in New York. "Requiring the HRVCB to issue a public report would have been more effective," he added.
Proliferation of fake, spurious claims
In the early 2000s, Ruben Carranza helped write the first draft of a law that would later become the basis for creating the Human Rights Victims' Claims Board (HRVCB).
Carranza said he only used the 1997 Hawaii class suit as a guide "mainly in relation to the evidence needed to prove eligibility" of human rights victims seeking claims.
"I don't remember referring to the number of class action members as a basis for anything else," said Carranza, replying to questions regarding the estimated number of those expected to file claims in Manila.
He added that legislators introduced the sunset clause because "perhaps it was their idea of imposing a deadline."
Sunset clauses aside, the claims board was nonetheless deluged with submissions, especially those who were not necessarily legitimate human rights victims.
The Facebook page of Project Nameless
Starting July 2014 up to January 2015, the board embarked on its "intake process." Several members and staff visited neighborhoods, communities, and localities, especially those where massacres and mass murders were known to take place. (Several intake processes were held in provincial hubs and town centers where the board was available to receive applications 24/7, especially from residents of far-flung areas.)
During these visits, the board received a "proliferation of late civil registration applications."
This was a phrase a board member used to refer to those who filed applications and claimed to be either son, daughter, or kin of supposed human rights victims who initially had no birth or death certificates to prove their existence.
"After submitting incomplete applications, they would come back an hour later bearing birth and death certificates of their relatives," a board member said. "Can you explain how that is possible?"
Another board member explained that these kinds of applications explained why the submissions reached 75,000. "Most of them contained bare allegations without any supporting documents," the board member said.
As a result, many of these claim applications were denied, according to Glenda Litong of the board's first division.
"If we found them fraudulent, spurious, or fake, we state that in the resolution but other than that, if we find no proof of these three characteristics, we just say that we found no evidence [that the claim is legitimate]."
During the review and deliberation of the claims, Litong said that the board reached out to several local civil registrars to verify identities. Members and staff even tried to get voters' lists in some areas to confirm whether victims actually existed or not. But the data privacy act prevented them from doing so, Litong said.
"For what it's worth, we really exerted efforts to get other information by other means."
A person previously reported missing shows up to collect reparations
Shortly after its nine members were appointed in February 2014, the Human Rights Victims' Claims Board wasted no time to get things up and running.
Besides putting up an office, the board needed to run and launch a national campaign to inform the public that it was going to recognize and provide compensation to those who were victims of abuse during the Marcos dictatorship. It also had to establish a process for accepting applications, set their deadlines, put them up on a centralized computer database, raffle them off to each of the board members, conduct research and investigation to verify claims, schedule case hearings, draft and issue decisions, send these resolutions through postal mail, allow time for redeliberations and appeals, and issue public advisories about approved claims (to inform the public and help weed out fraudulent applicants).
After the board's sunset clause kicked in, its members continued to hold meetings with other agencies such as the Commission on Audit and the Land Bank of the Philippines. The audit body sought to ensure that the checks issued by the government-led lender contained the claimants' correct names and were accompanied by copies of resolutions from claims board.
In coordination with the Land Bank, board members also helped conduct training sessions that taught claimants how to use automated teller machine cards because most of them never had bank accounts before.
In one rare instance, Land Bank even helped prevent fraud by refusing to release payment to a claimant.
After a father secured a favorable decision for losing his son in an enforced disappearance claim, the latter later showed up when it was time to collect payment. As a result, the father's claim was invalidated, prohibiting him from receiving compensation.
All told, these processes — from filing applications to fraud prevention — were established by a nine-member board and its staff. Not bad for a commission that was only intended to exist for two years.
Duterte replaces two members a year before board's term ends
In December 2017 — roughly one year after the board's term was extended by 730 days — then-president Rodrigo R. Duterte replaced two board members, one each from the second and third divisions.
Two lawyers were appointed to take their places, based on official communication from Malacañang sent via fax less than six months before the board became defunct.
A few board members considered filing a petition to prohibit the appointees from occupying their positions.
But the proposed move didn't take off.
It failed to secure majority support of the board, a quasi-judicial body whose members enjoyed fixed terms which no one could arguably cut short.
Filing a petition for mandamus would also further delay the reparations process for the long-suffering human rights victims. As it stood then, thousands have already died without the benefit of compensation, let alone state recognition of their sacrifices.
Meanwhile, victims who were still alive, were prompted to relive their pasts, no thanks to a reparations process that required official testimony, documentation, and verification.
The victims had to write down their affidavits as part of their applications, said Atty. Mejia of the board's second division. "Whether or not the victims were healed, [the claims process] was going to affect them in one way or the other," she said in an interview held online.
The official portrait of former president Rodrigo R. Duterte (Wikipedia)
In any case, the two new members appointed late in the reparations process were not known for their background in human rights. As a result, they may have had to reckon with a steep learning curve, which may have unduly made the board's work more complicated.
"The new appointees were assisted by the other board members," one board member said. "But then again, that cut into the time that they could have spent doing their work."
As of December 2017 — even before the two new appointees assumed office — only one of the nine members was close to completing her work.
Of the 8,000 claim applications assigned to her office, some 6,000 resolutions have already been issued, or roughly less than 11 percent of the total 75,730 applications.
As a result, claimants who were denied by this board member still had some time left to file their appeals.
However, most would no longer have that chance because the board would already cease to exist by May 2018.
"By the time we reached our third year, we really had to focus because we had only finished issuing resolutions for one-third of our claim applications," a board member said.
New law needed for reparations
A few months before the board finally closed its doors, its lawyers and paralegals spent their days and nights at the office regularly and worked during weekends and holidays. They had to check as many as 2000 resolutions a week for grammar, spelling, and accuracy, according to Justin Jose, a former paralegal who is now with the Legal Division-Protection Cluster of the Commission on Human Rights.
Eventually, out of the 75,730 applications, the board was able to approve 11,103 claims before its term ended. Funds for reparations — a P10 billion allocation and the board's P50 million annual budget — came from the Marcoses' stolen wealth previously stored in five Swiss bank accounts. Totalling $658 million, these were turned over by Swiss authorities to the Philippine government in December 1997.
"Of course, we're not saying that all that we've done were correct," said Litong, who is currently the head of the training and convention division of the University of the Philippines Law Center. "Our hope is that our margin of error for denying claims of legitimate human rights victims would only be small."
Litong also recognizes that reparations work for human rights victims under Martial Law remains unfinished.
Attys. Litong, Mejia, and Carranza all agree that a new law is needed. This is not just because the government needs to allow claimants to file their appeals or that it needs to encourage more human rights victims to file claims.
The new law should "provide more time for research and investigation to avoid challenges that bogged us down," Litong said, referring to issues involving identity verification, proof of residency, among others.
Other human rights advocates such as Maya Bans-Cortina said that the new reparations law should provide "support structures and social preparation" so that more human rights victims would be encouraged to emerge to file their claims.
In 2017, a town mayor in Isabela helped claimants prepare their affidavits so that they could submit their applications, said Bans-Cortina, a member of The Project Nameless Collective, a group which honors activists on its website.
"The 75,000 who applied is still a small figure," she said. "There are still a lot of human rights victims who were unable to file."