BC Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines
Press Release

Family of slain Filipina to gather in local commemoration celebration; call to stop political killings

July 24, 2007

Vancouver, B.C. – Family, friends and supporters of Alice Omengan-Claver will gather this Saturday, July 28 at 5:00 p.m. at the Kalayaan Centre, 451 Powell St. in Vancouver to mark the one year anniversary of her death and to commemorate and celebrate her life. Claver died a year ago from assassins bullets in Bulanao, Tabuk in the province of Kalinga in the Philippines.

Claver was in a car driven by her husband Dr. Constancio ‘Chandu’ Claver with their 11-year old daughter when killers believed to be military operatives ambushed them. Dr. Claver, who sustained multiple gunshot wounds and their daughter survived the attack. A practicing physician, Dr. Claver was chairperson of the partylist Bayan Muna (People First) in Kalinga. A large number of victims of human rights violations in the Philippines are members of Bayan Muna and other progressive people’s organizations and political parties that oppose the current regime of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Dr. Claver and his three daughters who are now seeking refugee in Canada, will attend the gathering.

“Alice's life and death is an inspiration to all peace-loving Filipinos and it is only fitting that we celebrate her life,” says Erie Maestro, acting chair of the B.C. Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines (BCCHRP), a Vancouver-based Philippine solidarity group. Maestro says the gathering will also honor the memory of other fallen martyrs of the state-sponsored extra-judicial killings.

The statistics of political killings are telling – 869 killed, 180 disappeared and over one million displaced according to the Philippine human rights group Karapatan, since President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo took power in 2001. The impunity of the killings, attributed to the government counter-insurgency plan Oplan Bantay Laya (Operation Freedom) has been documented and condemned by human rights watchdogs including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Last March 2007, the Permanent People’s Tribunal in its Second Session on the Philippines, found the Arroyo government and U.S. President George Bush guilty of crimes against humanity and its own people in the pursuit of its relentless “war on terror”.

The evening tribute is part of the international campaign – Stop the Killings in the Philippines (STKP) coordinated in Canada by the Philippines-Canada Task Force on Human Rights, which sent a delegation to the Philippines last year to investigate human rights violations. Its final report will be released this September.

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