Court clears student activist after five years in detention
Peasant sector organizer and student leader Amanda Echanis was ordered released from five years of detention after a local court in Tuguegarao City acquitted her of charges of illegal possession of firearms and explosives.
According to the decision of the Tuguegarao City Regional Trial Court (RTC) Branch 10, the prosecution “failed to establish all the essential elements” of the charges against Echanis.
“Mere speculations and probabilities cannot substitute for the quantum of proof required in criminal cases—proof beyond reasonable doubt—and the evidence presented did not overturn the accused’s constitutional presumption of innocence,” read part of the 17-page ruling penned by Judge Racquel Reyes-Aglaua. The decision was dated Dec. 27 but made public only on Wednesday.
A daughter of the late peace consultant Randall Echanis who was killed in August 2020, Echanis was accused of violating Republic Act No. 10591 or the Comprehensive Firearms and Ammunition Regulation Act, and RA 9156, which amended the laws concerning illegal possession of firearms. The court cleared her on both charges.
Cagayan operation
Echanis was attending to her 1-month-old baby when police officers arrested her at a house where she was staying in the wee hours of Dec. 2, 2020, in Baggao town in Cagayan province.
At the time of her arrest, which was just four months after the death of her father, Echanis was an active organizer of the Amihan National Federation of Peasant Women in Cagayan. She remained in detention as the charges were nonbailable.
According to the decision, the authorities “demonstrated a patent lack of substantial compliance” with the “knock-and-announce rule”—or Rule 126 of the Rules of the Court—when they came for her and searched the house.
“Taking the totality of these circumstances into account—that the mandatory ‘hierarchy of witnesses’ was bypassed, that there was delay in the conduct of the search, that there was lack of transparency and documentation of the very core of the operation… all without an acceptable explanation, the court finds the integrity of the entire search to be highly dubious,” it said.
The prosecution also “failed to meet the evidentiary threshold” with regard to the supposed possession or control of Echanis over the contraband items, the court said.
Decision cheered
Human rights advocates and peasant groups on Wednesday lauded the court decision, calling it a “resounding indictment of the military and police’s campaign of political repression and fabrication of charges.”
For the group Gabriela, the acquittal of Echanis is a testament to the “triumph of justice over the machinery of state terrorism.”
“Amanda Echanis should never have spent a single day in jail, much less five years robbed from her and her child,” Cristina Palabay, secretary general of Karapatan, said.
The Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas also welcomed Echanis’ acquittal, saying it affirmed what they had long asserted: “That the charges against Echanis were fabricated to punish her tireless organizing work among farmers and peasant women.”
‘Stolen freedom’
Kapatid, a support group for families of political prisoners, called for the release of nearly 700 more.
The allied groups also demanded that the officers who carried out Echanis’ illegal arrest be held criminally and administratively liable for her “years of stolen freedom.”
ACT Teachers Rep. and Deputy Minority Leader Antonio Tinio stressed that Echanis’ case “exposed the vicious pattern” of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-Elcac), the police and the military to “fabricate evidence [and] file trumped-up charges.”
“The NTF-Elcac has proven itself to be nothing more than an instrument of political persecution masquerading as a counterinsurgency program,” Tinio said in a statement.
