CLOSING STATEMENT FOR THE PETITIONERS1
12 December 2018
Delivered at the Commission on Human Rights Session Hall
Magandang hapon sa inyong lahat. Good afternoon to everyone who are here
and those watching us live online. To the Honorable Commissioners, a pleasant
afternoon.
This week, as the world celebrates the 70th birthday of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, that milestone in our evolution as a human family,
we also arrive at the end of these public hearings for what has been a first in the
world, a national inquiry into the responsibility of major fossil fuel and cement
companies -- respondent Carbon Majors -- for climate change and ocean
acidification and the impacts on the human rights of Filipinos. We have travelled
together on an extraordinary journey this year, learned a great deal from experts
in the fields of science, policy, the law, and from the stories of Filipinos, from here
and abroad, who experienced, continue to experience, or are threatened by the
impacts of climate change firsthand. They have helped to move this, sometimes,
abstract concept of human rights out of its legal frame and invited us to view its
meaning in the setting of everyday life. Please allow me to take you back.
A young indigenous woman of the Aeta-Ambala [Rica Cahilig] shared with
us her fear of losing cultural traditions of her people because of forests, springs,
and lands that can no longer provide the food and medicine they have always
relied on. She told us about her father, a farmer unable to bear the extreme heat,
forced to work shorter hours, and reduced income which made day-to-day
survival even harder.
A rice farmer [Felix “Kha Jhun” Pascua] invited us to see in a grain of rice
the symbol of a dream, a hope, and a dying family legacy, a now wretched
livelihood. He illuminated the tragic irony of farmers -- those who feed this country
-- going without enough to eat, dragged deeper into poverty and debt to
regenerate their fields after typhoons drown the crops, only to worry about the
drought that may come later. He laid bare for us the ingredients of life that
climate change is taking away: food to eat, land to till, a home to live in. Naguulyanin na ang panahon. “The weather is getting more senile,” he said, and
farmers at at its mercy.
A leader from the LGBTQIA community in Tacloban [Arthur Golong] helped
us to understand how what may appear to be simple, everyday luxuries for many
of us like a refrigerator, represented to her a dream, conjured by years of sacrifice,
Orally presented on 12 December 2018; updated and corrected with footnotes on 13
December 2018.
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Closing Statement for the Petitioners | 1