News Briefs

Washington D.C., Jul 23, 2017 / 03:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte and government officials are guilty of “social cleansing” under the guise of a war on drugs, advocates testified on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

“Duterte and other high officials of the land, having had to find a particular section of Philippine society worthy of elimination, have effectively put in place a de facto social cleansing policy whereby police and vigilantes are not only encouraged, but rewarded and forced to commit extrajudicial killings,” witness Ellecer Carlos told members of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission on Thursday.

The hearing on “The Human Rights Consequences of the War on Drugs in the Philippines” featured Carlos and two other witnesses from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. They testified on reports of extralegal killings in the Philippines as part of President Duterte’s “Operation Plan Tokhang,” the war on drugs.

The witnesses alleged that high-ranking officials in the Philippine government are complicit in human rights abuses where police officers and vigilantes, who may be working for and paid by the police, track down and kill those involved in the drug trade, with evidence present of other abuses like torture.

The targets are disproportionately poor people. “The vast majority of victims of drug-related killings come from the poorest segments of Philippine society,” Matthew Wells, senior crisis advisor at Amnesty International, stated in his written testimony before the commission.

Heads of poor families may be involved in the drug trade as a way to escape poverty, Wells said, or some may use methamphetamines to help stay awake and energized on a long work day. “The death of a breadwinner often puts families in a more precarious position, at times compounded by police officers stealing from them during crime scene investigations,” Wells said.

President Duterte ran for office on a platform of taking strong action against the drug trade in the country, making shocking statements to underline his commitment to action.

“Forget the laws on human rights. If I make it to the presidential palace, I will do just what I did as mayor,” the BBC reported him saying. Duterte was previously the mayor of the city of Davao, where he made a name for himself as the “death squad mayor.”

“You drug pushers, hold-up men and do-nothings, you better go out. Because I’d kill you,” he said while running for president. “I’ll dump all of you into Manila Bay, and fatten all the fish there.”

Duterte was elected president in May of 2016. Since then “his rhetoric quickly became all too real” in the war on drugs, Wells stated in his testimony before the commission.

Police officers and vigilantes had killed over 7,000 persons in the drug trade from July, 2016 through January, 2017, according to numbers provided by the Philippine National Police.

While the authorities kept statistics for the first few months of the spike in drug-related deaths, they stopped providing transparency, Wells said. According to the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, there have been “blatant inconsistencies and a deliberate attempt to conceal the magnitude of the killings” in the war on drugs, Carlos said.

The killings allegedly undertaken by vigilantes were among the worst human rights problems in the country, the State Department noted in its most recent human rights report.

On Tuesday, Wells described how police officers are paid under-the-table for “encounters” with drug traffickers where “offenders are killed,” and that there is a pay scale for killing drug sellers and users. Vigilantes are also handed hit lists of suspects in the drug trade by police. They carry out the killings for the police, offering them some mode of cover.

Many of the killings are made at night, through home invasions or drive-by shootings. The “modus operandi” of the police is to barge in the door of a home of a suspect at night; in the encounter, the suspect is shot but the police can use the cover of darkness to claim that the suspect was the initial aggressor, Phelim Kine, deputy director of the Asia division of Human Rights Watch, said.

More and more citizens have begun sleeping in the streets to be witnesses, taking video of the incidents to ensure that the truth is documented.

A Reuters investigation had uncovered “payments for killings” by police to vigilantes, and showed significant evidence that a “license to kill” had been granted from high levels of government, Wells said.

All this has been an “economy of murder created by the war on drugs, with the police at the center,” Wells said. And there is “scant accountability,” he said, as there have been no convictions of police officers in drug killings and the family members of those killed “face obstacle after obstacle” in seeking justice.

The testimony of a survivor of an extralegal killing, 29 year-old Efren Morillo, was also submitted to the record. Morillo is the lead petitioner before the Philippine Supreme Court in the first case against Operation Plan Tokhang.

Morillo described being at a friend’s house when five men and two women in civilian clothes arrived, armed with guns. They detained five members of the group and accused them of selling illegal drugs. Morillo recognized some of the men as police officers in civilian clothes. The armed men then shot the five civilians.

The Philippine bishops have been outspoken against the increase in killings, referring to it as a “reign of terror” in a Jan. 30 pastoral letter.

“If we neglect the drug addicts and pushers we have become part of the drug problem, if we consent or allow the killing of suspected drug addicts, we shall also be responsible for their deaths,” the bishops said.

“We cannot correct a wrong by doing another wrong,” they said. “A good purpose is not a justification for using evil means. It is good to remove the drug problem, but to kill in order to achieve this is also wrong.”

Duterte, however, responded to the letter by saying “You Catholics, if you believe in your priests and bishops, you stay with them,” while adding that “if you want to go to heaven, then go to them. Now, if you want to end drugs … I will go to hell, come join me.”

Duterte has also “openly threatened human rights defenders” and “attacked the media and lawyers who have represented the families of extrajudicial killings,” Carlos said on Tuesday.  

Catholic priests have also offered their churches as “sanctuaries” for those who believe they are on the police hit lists, the Guardian reported in February.

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Washington D.C., Jul 22, 2017 / 04:02 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Congress’ proposed federal budget will fail to provide for the basic needs of millions of America’s poor people, the U.S. bishops have said in a call for a morally sound budget.

&l… […]

Albuquerque, N.M., Jul 21, 2017 / 06:40 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The Women of Grace apostolate will mark 30 years at its national conference this year, an event which aims to help women celebrate their “gift of authentic femininity.”

“Co… […]

Washington D.C., Jul 21, 2017 / 04:52 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The US bishops’ representative for domestic justice has asked Senators not to vote to repeal the current health care law unless they have an alternative in place that offers acceptable levels of coverage.

“In the face of difficulties” of bringing health care legislation to the Senate floor, Bishop Frank Dewane of Venice said in a letter to senators on Thursday, “the appropriate response is not to create greater uncertainty, especially for those who can bear it least, by repealing the ACA [Affordable Care Act] without a replacement.”

“Yet,” he said July 20, “reform is still needed to address the ACA’s moral deficiencies and challenges with long-term sustainability.”

After the House passed a health care bill repealing the ACA and replacing it with provisions of the American Health Care Act (AHCA), the Senate has worked on producing a bill of its own, the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA). However, the Senate has so far failed to bring a health care bill to the floor for a vote.

This week, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced that not only did the Senate not have the votes to pass the health care bill, but it did not have the votes required to sustain debate on repealing and replacing the ACA.

He announced that a vote would occur anyhow, on the House health care bill with an amendment attached that would repeal the current health care law but allow for a two-year transition period for stability.

A vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act is expected as soon as Tuesday. However, according to reports it is still unclear exactly which bill the Senate would vote on to replace the Affordable Care Act.

The pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List, for example, advocated on Friday that the Senate should vote either on its own health care bill or on the 2015 reconciliation bill that repealed the ACA. Those bills would end the funding of abortion coverage within the ACA, Susan B. Anthony List said.

Pro-life leaders, including Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, and Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life, met with Vice President Mike Pence on Friday. Mancini called it a “good meeting” and reiterated that “abortion is not health care,” referring to funding of abortion coverage under the current health care law.

Bishop Dewane had previously said that no repeal of the current health care law should be made without a suitable replacement plan. “To end coverage for those who struggle every day without an adequate alternative in place would be devastating,” Bishop Dewane said.

He said any replacement plan must be one that “protects poor and vulnerable people, including immigrants, safeguards the unborn, and supports conscience rights.” The replacement plans that have been proposed by the House and Senate are “seriously flawed, and would have harmed those most in need in unacceptable ways,” he said.

While the bishop had applauded the Hyde Amendment protections in the House bill that would have blocked the taxpayer funding of abortions through tax credits and other subsidies, he had expressed serious concern about its changes to Medicaid and other provisions. The bill, he said, would cut coverage or make it more cost-prohibitive for those who may need it most, like the elderly, the poor, and the chronically ill.

The revised Senate plan, meanwhile, was still “unacceptable,” the bishop said in a statement last Thursday.

Regarding the original Senate health care proposal, in his June 27 letter Bishop Dewane said that “at a time when tax cuts that would seem to benefit the wealthy and increases in other areas of federal spending, such as defense, are being contemplated, placing a ‘per capita cap’ on medical coverage for the poor is unconscionable.”

He added that under the bill health coverage costs could increase for many elderly and poor persons “because of decreased levels of tax credit support and higher premiums.” And, the bishop said, the bill, like its House counterpart, lacked conscience protections.

He warned that the pro-life language in the bill was laudable, but echoed concerns of other pro-lifers that the language could be stripped by the Senate Parliamentarian before it reached the Senate Floor.

The revised Senate bill contained some slight improvements like more funding to fight opioid addiction, “but more is needed to honor our moral obligation to our brothers and sisters living in poverty and to ensure that essential protections for the unborn remain in the bill,” he said last Thursday.

This week, however, the Senate bill was scuttled. Yet amid the uncertainty of what the senators may vote on next week, “the appropriate response is not to create greater uncertainty, especially for those who can bear it least, by repealing the ACA without a replacement,” Bishop Dewane said.

On Friday, Pence urged Americans to ask their senator to vote to begin the debate to repeal and replace the ACA on Tuesday.

Susan B. Anthony List, meanwhile, said the Senate should work to ensure a bill is passed which defunds Planned Parenthood and protects taxpayer funding from going to abortion coverage in federally-subsidized plans.  

“The first step is voting for the motion to proceed to the House-passed bill which replaces Obamacare abortion funding with health assistance that does not include abortion coverage and redirects funding for certain abortion providers to noncontroversial community health centers,” the group’s president Marjorie Dannenfelser said in a July 20 letter to senators.

“While the House bill faces procedural hurdles, we support passage of a substitute amendment that is substantially similar to the Obamacare repeal bill sent to President Obama in January 2016,” she added.

“Obamacare has been a disaster for unborn children through its unprecedented expansion of taxpayer-funded abortion,” Dannenfelser said.

“The 2015 reconciliation bill that was sent to President Obama’s desk or the Better Care Reconciliation Act would roll back this damage and help return us to the principle that abortion is not health care.”

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Denver, Colo., Jul 21, 2017 / 04:05 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The 50th anniversary of a historic statement that changed Catholic higher education in America represents both a cautionary tale and a chance to reflect on Catholic renewal, said Bishop James D. … […]

Sacramento, Calif., Jul 21, 2017 / 12:02 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Pro-abortion groups are lobbying for a California law that Catholic leaders warn would open employers like Catholic schools to lawsuits for asking teachers to follow their codes of conduct.
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Washington D.C., Jul 21, 2017 / 03:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- While there is talk of criminal justice reform in the U.S., something must also be done about a decades-long spike in female inmates, experts and members of Congress of both parties said.

“We talk a lot about racial disparities in our system, but for some odd reason, we’ve really not focused on women, and it’s been to the detriment of public safety,” Holly Harris, executive director of the Justice Action Network, told CNA.

Harris spoke at the event “Women Unshackled,” sponsored by both the Justice Action Network and the Brennan Center for Justice, and was held at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. on July 18.

It featured a keynote address by Gov. Mary Fallin of Oklahoma (R) and speeches by members of Congress of both parties, Rep. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Rep. Sheila Jackson lee (D-Tex.), Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.) and Rep. Mia Love (R-Utah).

“If we as a country value life as much as we say we do, then we value all life, even those who have made mistakes and have went through the incarceration system,” Rep. Collins said in the morning welcome remarks.

“How can we justify a system that takes people who are survivors of trauma, survivors of abuse, and put them on a survivor of sexual trauma to prison pipeline?” asked Sen. Booker, who had said in his address that many women in prison have previously suffered trauma, which may be triggered or exacerbated during their stay in prison.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops had addressed the rising numbers of women in prison in their 2000 statement on criminal justice reform “Responsibility, Rehabilitation, and Restoration.”

The bishops said that the large increase in the number of women in prison came “largely as a result of tougher drug laws,” that most of the women were incarcerated for non-violent offenses, and that “an equal number have left children behind, often in foster care, as they enter prison.”

According to the Vera Institute of Justice, the numbers of women behind bars have grown more with each decade, especially when the U.S. is compared to other countries on the issue.

The research is “incredibly dated and scarce,” Elizabeth Swavola of the Vera Institute said at the “Women Unshackled” event on Tuesday, but from what information the organization has been able to study, the numbers are striking.

While fewer than 8,000 women were incarcerated in the U.S. in 1970, 110,000 were incarcerated in 2014, the Vera Institute reported, with the sharpest increases coming in small or “midsize” counties. In the U.S.,127 women per 100,000 people are incarcerated. In Canada that rate is just 11 per 100,000.

They make up the “fastest growing segment of the prison population” Harris said. Most of them are mothers, and many, like the men in prison, suffer from drug issues, poverty, and mental illness, and racial minorities make up higher rates of the prison population than in society.

Many women, however, have suffered previous instances of trauma – which can be exacerbated or triggered in prison. Vera reported that “almost a third had experienced post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the past 12 months,” and that 86 percent of women in prison have “experienced sexual violence in their lifetime,” along with 77 percent suffering from partner violence.

Eighty percent are also mothers, with some being the primary caretaker for their children, Vera reported. “In many instances,” Cynthia Berry of the Council for Court Excellence said, “children aren’t even told their mother is incarcerated.”

If their mother is their primary caretaker, children may end up in the foster care system as a result, and mothers may not eventually be reunited with their children after they are released from prison.

Most are in prison for low-level or non-violent offenses. “According to the latest available national data, which are now more than a decade old,” Vera reported, “32 percent of women in jail are there for property offenses, 29 percent for drug offenses, and nearly 21 percent for public order offenses.”

For the violent offenders, some are serving sentences for violence committed against people who were violent with them, like women retaliating against abusive husbands or boyfriends.

Why has there been such a sharp increase in the number of women behind bars?

There is “very little out there explaining why,” Swavola said, but from Vera’s findings, “at the very front end, policing practices have come to increasingly focus on low-level, non-violent offenses” like low-level drug possession and disorderly conduct. This would be the result of “broken window” type policing, based on the belief that if smaller infractions are punished, there will be fewer greater infractions.

Because of a “punitive” approach to drug enforcement, she said, there are more women in the prison system.

Yet once they land in prison, they face a system that is hard enough for men to cope with, but one that at least is designed for men. For the women, they face greater threats of abuse and a more severe lack of privacy.

“Women are different from men,” Harris told CNA/EWTN News. “Their needs would be different. So unfortunately right now, women are entering prisons that are programmed for men.”

The result is that, although time in prison may help men become more hardened criminals, women may exit feeling far more degraded and dejected.

“All of these women have completely physically changed,” Harris said. They are visibly lacking self-confidence and staring at the floor. “It’s just clear that they are emotionally and mentally devastated.”

They are more likely to be victimized in prison. For instance, while women accounted for only 13 percent of the local jail population between 2009 and 2011, 67 percent of victims of staff-on-inmate sexual victimization were women, as well as 27 percent of inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization, Vera reported.

They may have to endure indignities like male prison officers walking in to their room while they are undressed, Sen. Booker said. Practices common in prison like shackling and searching inmates “can really re-trigger a lot of that trauma,” Swavola said.

Also, women prisoners tend to be poorer, which means that they may have less of a chance of having their bail paid or may not be able to afford expenses in prison like basic health necessities, laundry expenses, or phone calls home.

“Some jails charge inmates a per diem fee during their incarceration,” Vera reported, “which can leave an individual with thousands of dollars of criminal justice debt upon release.”

Prison can be “incredibly destabilizing and disruptive” to a woman’s life, Swavola said, especially in the case of a severely mentally ill woman.

Cash bail and “excessive fines and fees” can “trap women in the system,” she said.

What solutions can be attempted for the problem of women in prisons? States and counties could begin to invest more in drug treatment and prevention programs rather than law enforcement, Swavola said.

“A huge portion of these county and community budgets go toward public safety,” she said, and “oftentimes it’s 70 to 80 percent.” Much of that portion “is to corrections,” she said.

Other programs like diversion programs do not get resources, she said. “I think we really need to rethink how we are using our taxpayer dollars to fund the justice system.”

Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin (R) said that her state has put too many women behind bars and is working on decreasing the number of incarcerated.

“For many of our non-violent, low-level offenders, there are alternatives that work better,” she said, like “drug and mental health courts” and “community based treatment, diversion programs, supervision.”

Recidivism is also a large cause of women in prisons, Vera reported.

“It’s no wonder that the female prison population is spiking, because we’re not providing these women with the tools that they’ll need to successfully re-enter society,” Harris said.

“They are not equipped mentally, emotionally, they can’t find jobs, they can’t improve their education, they can’t reconnect with their families, they can’t get adequate housing.”

For instance, CNA spoke with an ex-convict, Casey Irwin, back in April who had been convicted of bank fraud and drug-related offenses.

“I can get a job, but it wasn’t going to pay me any money, and I wasn’t going to ever move up,” Irwin told CNA of her difficulty in finding a job after prison that paid her enough in wages.

Eventually, she was offered a managerial position at a fast food franchise, but said that more opportunities must be available to ex-convicts, who face a myriad of obstacles from employment to obtaining loans.

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Denver, Colo., Jul 20, 2017 / 05:48 pm (CNA).- When most people hear about a stereotypical “large Catholic family,” they might picture a van that seats six or eight kids. Most wouldn’t think of having so many great-grandchildren that … […]