Text courtesy of our United Against Torture colleagues, IRCT
Dr Benito Molino has been documenting and treating survivors of torture in the Philippines since the 1980s. As a co-founding member of the Medical Action Group (MAG) ‘Doc Ben’ as he is known has been on the frontlines for the fight for human rights in the Philippines over decades of military dictatorship, Communist witch-hunts, and now the so-called ‘War on Drugs’.
“In the Philippines, telling the truth is really a challenge,” said Dr Molino, who is one of the Philippines leading independent forensic experts. “The Government rewards police who make more arrests, so lying and misinterpreting the evidence becomes ever more. But photographs, bones, they never lie.”
Over his long career, Dr Molino has examined thousands of his fellow Filipinos who come to MAG after detention by the police or military, assessing physical evidence and conducting a psychological examination with the survivor to give a clinical opinion on the overall possibility of torture and other ill-treatment, following the internationally agreed Manual for Effective Investigation and Documentation of Torture, the Istanbul Protocol.
Article 12 of the UN Convention Against Torture, which was adopted 40 years ago and which the United Against Torture Consortium (UATC) is marking with a series of interviews and stories, mandates each State Party to: “[E]nsure that its competent authorities proceed to a prompt and impartial investigation, wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed in any territory under its jurisdiction.”
The Philippines became a State Party to the Convention in 1986 and passed its own Anti-Torture Act in 2009. Yet torture has been increasing in the Philippines over the past decade, driven by the government’s so-called War on Drugs, launched by former President Rodrigo Duterte, which rights groups say killed between 12,000 to 30,000 people and which is now being investigated by the International Criminal Court.
Yet there have been only two criminal convictions under the Anti-Torture Act, both driven by evidence collected not by the State but by human rights groups working with independent forensic experts, including Dr Molino: “As long as there are victims of human rights violations and I can continue to document, I will. We can’t allow these kind of injustices to affect people. If we will not document it, then who will?”
Watch the complete interview with Dr Benito Molino: Frontline Forensics in the Philippines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNojP_HkagU&list=PLTdh2NV8ddxAATwyhBuu-_jD-ZdUag-y1&index=9&t=1s
And learn more about the pioneering work of Medical Action Group (MAG) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6Ovm-44srk&list=PLTdh2NV8ddxAATwyhBuu-_jD-ZdUag-y1&index=10