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• Marie Enriquez Tour

• Click here for Marie's Speech

• Click here for Marie's CV

• Click www.newint.org for an article on Marie on New Internationalist (NI) Issue 371, September 2004 (Mao Cover)

MARIE HILAO-ENRIQUEZ
FILIPINO HUMAN RIGHTS LEADER TOURED NZ
OCTOBER 2004

THE PHILIPPINES IN THE FIRING LINE
AMERICA'S "SECOND FRONT IN THE 'WAR ON TERROR'"AND THE IMPACT ON HUMAN RIGHTS

Marie Hilao-Enriquez is the head of Karapatan, one of the biggest and best known human rights groups in the Philippines, and also of Selda, the organisation of former political prisoners from the 1970s and 80s martial law dictatorship of the late Ferdinand Marcos. Marie herself was a Marcos prisoner and her family suffered badly (one sister was murdered by the military, another two siblings were imprisoned). Marie has been a leading figure in the Philippine human rights movement for the past 30 years. She travels the world on its behalf. Most recently, she has done a speaking tour of the US and Canada; addressed the UN Committee on Human Rights; and is an official observer at the Oslo peace talks between the Philippine Government and the Communists (there has been a civil war for 35 years).

The Bush Administration is running amok and using war as its first response in any situation it doesn't like. In the early 1990s, a massive people's movement ended nearly a century of US military bases in the Philippines. But Bush and his allies in the Philippines are using the "War On Terror" and the decades-old armed struggle being waged by Muslim separatists in the south as a pretext to get back in. Human rights have been trampled on. Marie Hilao-Enriquez's tour presented an exciting opportunity to hear first hand from a leading Majority World human rights activist.

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