PRESS STATEMENT
26 May 2006

Issued by
Annalisa Enrile, National Chairperson
GABRIELA Network USA
chair@gabnet.org, (212) 592-3507

We are pleased to announce the departure of an all-women human rights legal team from the United States to the Philippines. Team members are as follows:

• Jill Soffiyah Elijah, Deputy Director, Criminal Justice Institute, Harvard Law School. BA, Cornell University; Juris Doctorate, Wayne State University Law School. Ms. Elijah was in private practice for several years before joining Harvard. She specialized in criminal defense and family law. She has authored several articles and publications and has represented numerous political prisoners and social activists over the past 22 years.
• Rachel Lederman, National Lawyers Guild. Ms. Lederman is one of the authors of the NLG?s Know Your Rights pamphlet. She won a million-dollar law suit against the city of San Francisco for unlawfully rounding up demonstrators protesting the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles.
• Vanessa Lucas, National Lawyers Guild. Juris Doctorate and MA in International Business Administration, University of San Diego, CA. Ms. Lucas is in private practice, representing clients in cases that include employment, labor law and civil rights. Her interests include using international law in domestic practice and immigrant rights.
• Merrilyn Onisko, National Lawyers Guild, currently serves as co-chair of the NLG?s Middle East Subcommittee; also on the NLG?s Steering Committee of the International Committee and the United Nations Subcommittee. She is an alternate representative to the United Nations for the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL). She recently returned from Bulgaria and Cuba where she presented reports on UN activities to the IADL Bureau. She speaks French, Spanish, Russian and conversational Mandarin.
• Tina Monshipour Foster, Esq, Center for Constitutional Rights. Juris Doctorate from the Cornell Law School where she was editor of the Cornell International Law Journal and President of the Cornell Law Students Association. Ms. Foster has been deeply engaged in the pursuit of the protection and observance of civil rights for detainees held in US detention facilities all over the world. Before joining CCR, Ms. Foster practiced law in New York, specializing in criminal defense and class action litigation.

This all-women human rights legal team is a joint project of GABRIELA Network and the Vanguard Foundation, in cooperation with the National Lawyers Guild and the Center for Constitutional Rights.

While in the Philippines, the team will be co-hosted by the GABRIELA National Alliance of Women and by the Gabriela Women?s Party.

The team will meet with the Batasan 6 and their legal defense team; listen to accounts and testimonies regarding the assassination of some 585 activists, organizers, unionists, communist and church leaders, but most of all, to accounts of the assassination of some 70 politically active women.

GABRIELA Network initiated this project in the spirit of internationalism and global sisterhood. Alarmed by the continuing murder of both men and women actively engaged in the practice and pursuit of democratic rights, GABNet is seeking ways and means by which the human, civil and political rights of the people, as well as women?s rights, be respected in the archipelago, in the face of governmental indifference to the Filipino people?s right to be safe and secure in their homeland.

As a women?s organization, the persecution and murder of women activists, organizers and leaders, as well as of women?s organizations, cut us to the bone. Our members who are of Philippine ancestry know full well the role that organizing for one?s collective interests plays in the pursuit of the optimal in working and living conditions.

The Filipino workers of the plantations of Hawaii and California, of the canneries of Alaska, broke out of their serf-like conditions in the 1930s only by organizing themselves and joining their brother workers in unions. Filipina nurses throughout the U.S. freed themselves from temporary worker visas in the 1980s by organizing for their right to permanent residency. GABNet began the agitation against the traffic of women and the mail-order bride system in the 1990s, work which bore fruit only in the last five years.

In the face of repression, exploitation and injustice, history shows us that the only way to freedom is through sustained activism and perseverance in the defense and advancement of the people?s democratic and human rights. But how can we expect the 700,000 women exported from the Philippines in 2005, as well as all migrant Filipinas who now comprise over 65% of overseas Filipinos, to seek just working and living conditions, to struggle against abuse and exploitation, to oppose traffickers, to fight against racial and gender discrimination, if their own sisters in the archipelago are being killed for doing exactly the same thing?

July 28 summary report

May 26 press release

May 26 press statement

Letter to US Ambassador to the Philippines

Letter to Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo

Statement of All-Women HR Team. 31 May 2006