American victim of Duterte’s crimes against humanity calls for justice

Brandon Lee calls for justice for all the victims of  former Pres. Rodrigo Duterte’s crimes against humanity. Photo from Church & Society, United Methodist Church website

SAN FRANCISCO – An American human rights advocate, who became a quadriplegic after he was shot in the Philippines in a suspected extrajudicial assassination attempt by the Duterte administration, has called for justice for all the victims of the former president’s crimes against humanity.

Brandon Lee, a US citizen based in San Francisco, has welcomed Duterte’s recent arrest by the International Criminal Court (ICC), describing it as “one big step toward justice for thousands of victims” of these crimes.

“Duterte must be held accountable for all the extrajudicial killings and prosecuted to the fullest extent of international law,” Lee said at a virtual press conference on March 13.

“The international community is watching and will continue to support the Filipino people’s demand for justice,”

Lee said he became the first American targeted by the Duterte administration when he was defending the human rights of indigenous Filipinos and working as a community journalist in the Cordillera region.

On August 6, 2019, he was shot four times by the 54th Infantry Battalion in front of his home, leaving him permanently paralyzed as a quadriplegic.

“Duterte’s arrest is deeply personal to me as one of the over 30,000 victims of his bloody regime. What the world knows about the atrocities of this war on drugs, is really a war on the poor.

My experience is that under the Duterte’s regime, there were always a lot of killings in the rural areas, especially in indigenous and impoverished communities, to permanently silence the people defending their land and their livelihood.”

Born and raised in San Francisco, Brandon Lee was a student activist at San Francisco State University before he moved to the Philippines in 2010 to support the indigenous people’s efforts for self-determination and defense of their ancestral land.

He worked for the Cordillera Human Rights Alliance and was a correspondent for the Northern Dispatch Weekly.

He currently resides with his family in San Francisco and serves as the chairperson of the  International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHIRP), which co-hosted the virtual press conference with Malaya Movement USA and BAYAN USA.

The press conference was part of  the groups’ series of actions in the US, including rallies in front of Philippine consulates, in response to Duterte’s arrest.

Lee said Duterte’s crackdown on his critics was “eerily similar” to his war on drugs that had devastated so many people’s lives.

“I should know as a survivor of an attempted assassination, which caused severe trauma to me and my family,” he said.

“His war in the countryside of the Philippines terrorized thousands of rural poor peasants. His failed economic policy of ‘build, build, build’ led to ‘kill, kill, kill’ and militarization and bombing of rural indigenous communities.”

Lee called for the arrest of Duterte’s accomplices, including members of the military and the police force who carried out the extrajudicial killings.