Luis Liwanag/BenarNews
The defense secretary Tuesday defended a government move to terminate an agreement that barred security forces from entering the Manila campus of the state-run University of the Philippines, as he cited concerns about it being a haven for communist insurgents.
The move by the Department of National Defense, announced on Monday night, was widely criticized on Tuesday as potentially trampling on dissent and free speech, while students from the campus staged a protest in response to it.
Students’ outspokenness on issues, such as President Rodrigo Duterte’s controversial war on drugs, had caused the campus to fall out of favor with his administration. Duterte had threatened to defund the university, and accused its students of spending more time away from their classrooms to protest in the streets.
"In pursuit of true national peace and development, it is time to terminate or aborgate the existing agreement with the end view if protecting and securing the institution and youth against the enemies of the Filipino people without sacrificing the freedoms we have preserved for about 30 years since the agreement was executed," Lorenzana told UP President Danny Concepcion in a letter.
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is continuously spreading across different regions in the country as the reproduction rate remains above 1, an expert from the OCTA Research Team said.
Published January 18, 2021 11:45pm The LFS characterized the abrogation as an attack on UP s status as a haven for free-thought and academic freedom for students and was a demonstration of the government s distorted sense of priorities given the more pressing concern of the COVID-19 pandemic. The progressive student organization argued further that the action taken by the national security establishment stemmed from the Anti-Terrorism Law, which was created to silence government critics and student-activists and had nothing to do with combating the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People s Army. The alleged recruitment of student leaders by the CPP-NPA was merely the excuse used to do away with the academic freedom of students whom the government had long been “red-tagging.”