Chito Gascon: Filipino human rights activist who fought for justice

His organisation of peaceful protests during the Eighties helped end 20 years of Ferdinand Marcos’s autocratic rule

Gascon spent his entire career, from his student days in Manila and at Cambridge, fighting for democracy and social reform (AFP/Getty)

Jose Luis “Chito” Gascon, a Filipino lawyer and human rights activist who opposed the autocratic rule of Ferdinand Marcos and more recently brought global attention to the murderous “war on drugs” launched by current strongman president Rodrigo Duterte, has died aged 57.

Gascon spent his entire career, from his student days in Manila and at Cambridge, fighting for democracy, social reform and human rights around the world. As 21-year-old president of the students’ council at the University of the Philippines, he helped to organise peaceful street protests that, combined with a military mutiny, ended Marcos’s 20-year rule in the February 1986 People Power Revolution.

Gascon was part of a summer fellows programme at Stanford University in 2005 aimed at training potential global leaders to work on the front lines towards democratic change. Michael McFaul, director of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a former US ambassador to Russia, described Gascon as “a true hero for human rights”.

Since 2015, Gascon had been chair of the Philippine government’s Commission on Human Rights (CHR). Appointed by the previous president, Benigno Aquino III, he became one of the biggest thorns in the political flesh of Duterte.

After Duterte became president in 2016, he and Gascon had public disagreements almost daily over the drug war. Duterte’s police forces and the vigilante groups he inspired killed or “disappeared” thousands of drug dealers and addicts in recent years. Many more are believed to have been killed by gangs taking their lead from the police and feeling safe from them.

Duterte said he wanted drug dealers off the streets, but their bodies were often found on those same streets, with the president claiming the country’s courts were too clogged to put them on trial.

Photos of corpses, often wrapped up in packaging tape with cards reading “drug dealer”, shocked the world, especially after families said they were not dealers but addicts who had been trying to get help. Duterte’s supporters began revering Ronald dela Rosa, his shaven-headed chief of the National Police, who took on a rockstar image and had women screaming in adoration in the streets. Dela Rosa, nicknamed “Bato” (the Rock), later quit the police force and won a Senate seat in 2019.

For his courageous condemnation of Duterte’s extrajudicial killings in the name of the “war on drugs”, Gascon rose to global prominence in recent years, attacking the threat to democracy around the world. As keynote speaker at the 2017 Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy – a global coalition of nongovernmental human rights groups – he warned of “the menacing twin spectres of violent extremism and illiberal populist demagoguery looming heavily in every hemisphere, ready to overwhelm us into submission”.

He lamented “the same old arguments, that in uncertain and difficult times, such as we currently have, the only safety and security that one can obtain is that which can be given by a strongman we must obey and surrender our fundamental rights to”. Calling on people around the world to resist these threats, he added: “Pushback is when journalists fight for truth against all odds, even when they are called enemies of the people.”

In 2017, Duterte publicly threatened to shut down the Commission on Human Rights and tried to discredit Gascon by calling him “gay” and a “paedophile”.

Duterte’s popularity rating remains around 70 per cent domestically, although Gascon’s investigations were beginning to chip away at it in recent months. And Gascon’s campaign received a major boost earlier this month when his friend, Filipino journalist Maria Ressa, shared the Nobel Peace Prize for her dogged battle for press freedom in the Philippines.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) recently launched an investigation into the thousands of extrajudicial killings of drug dealers and addicts under Duterte, but has announced no progress so far. Duterte has refused to cooperate with the ICC or allow its investigators into the country.

Duterte has not commented on Gascon’s death, but vice-president Maria Leonor Robredo paid tribute to him. “My sympathies are with his wife and children, the entire CHR staff and all those who defend human rights and an equal and free society,” she said in a statement.

“He was a student leader, advocate and mentor that so many looked up to,” she said. “When I was still a student ... it was Chito who led us in marches against the dictatorship,” she added, referring to the 20-year rule of president Ferdinand Marcos.

Jose Luis Martin Gascon was born in Manila on 26 May 1964. He first studied philosophy and later law at the University of the Philippines in the capital, before receiving a master’s degree in international law at the University of Cambridge in England.

In addition to his brother, survivors include his wife, previously Melissa Mercado, and a daughter, Ciara. Details of any additional survivors were not immediately available.

After Gascon’s participation in the overthrow of Marcos, the new president, Corazon Aquino, appointed him as the youngest member of a commission to draft a new constitution, which took effect in 1987. He also became the nation’s youngest congressman.

He initially focused on children’s rights and went on to hold various human-rights-related roles within the government, in Congress and independently. Before being elected chair of the Commission on Human Rights, he was involved in winning compensation for victims of martial law under Marcos.

Leila de Lima, a Filipino human rights activist and senator, wrote a tribute on the website rappler.com, co-founded by Ressa. It had extra resonance, having been written from a jail cell where she has spent more than four years on what she calls “trumped-up charges”.

Formerly chair of the Senate committee on justice and human rights, she was accused of corruption involving drug proceeds. No evidence emerged, and she and her supporters insist she was jailed for her outspoken opposition to Duterte.

Praising Gascon as an inspiration, she wrote: “You can spend years speaking about defending human rights, and advocating for justice for victims, but nothing can ever prepare you for being a victim yourself. The helplessness is real, no matter how strong you think yourself to be.

“And Chito was there for me. A defender and a victim, yes, but a fellow human rights advocate from beginning to end ... He helped keep my story alive in the minds of allies here and abroad.”

Chito Gascon, lawyer, civil organiser, and human rights activist, born 26 May 1964, died 9 October 2021

© The Washington Post