MANILA, Philippines – Filipino-American human rights advocates have urged US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to make human rights part of the agenda when she meets with President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo this week.

Clinton is visiting the country November 12 to 13 before proceeding to Singapore for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.

While here, she will pay a courtesy call on Arroyo and meet with Foreign Secretary Alberto Romulo.

Katarungan, or the Center for Peace, Justice, and Human Rights in the Philippines, latched onto the reported withholding by the US State Department of $2 million in military aid to the Philippines for the government’s failure to implement conditions on human rights inserted into the law on foreign military financing.

“The US State Department’s decision affirmed what the growing number of victims of violations in the Philippines and their families continue to voice – that the Philippine government has failed to take scathing international criticism seriously enough to make the far-reaching reforms necessary to stop widespread human rights abuses in which its military has been implicated,” Joanna Quiambao, Outreach Coordinator of Katarungan, said.

“In fact, we hope Sec. Clinton and the State Department will encourage Congress, in particular Sen. (Dan)Inouye, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, to reconsider setting foreign military financing for the Philippines in the coming year at double the amount of the President’s request,” she added.

Katarungan coordinator Katrina Abarcar noted that Inouye’s statement that the Arroyo administration had made “adequate progress” in human rights, “when only one person from the military has been convicted of a crime despite evidence of involvement in hundreds of cases,” was sending the message that “it is acceptable to ‘curb’ or slow down the political killings instead of putting an end to them.”

Local and international human rights organizations have counted more than 1,000 extrajudicial killings of activists and other dissenters since 2001, when Arroyo came to power, and have invariably blamed this on a government counterinsurgency strategy that targets leaders and members of legal organizations openly tagged by security forces as “fronts” of the communist rebel movement.

There have also been hundreds of enforced disappearances under the current administration.

“US military aid to the Philippines should be cut until the extrajudicial killings are decisively stopped and the victims given justice,” Quiambao said. “We hope as a first step, Sec. Clinton will publicly address and denounce the continuing human rights abuses and culture of impunity in the Philippines.”