Philippines: community-based defender goes missing
Event- Country
- Philippines
- Initial Date
- Apr 5, 2022
- Event Description
On April 5, Kadamay-Negros education officer Iver Larit is reported missing after he left his residence in Bacolod City. According to Karapatan, Larit left his house around 9:00 a.m. that day but he reportedly did not arrive at an appointment with an urban poor community which he was helping to organize against threats of demolition. By 10:00 a.m. Larit’s son could no longer reach him through his mobile number.
Larit is a former political prisoner and has been a target of harassment and other attacks throughout the years, Karapatan said. In 2011, he was detained for eight months over a trumped-up robbery-in-band charge. He was eventually released after the court dismissed the charges against him due to lack of substantial evidence.
Karapatan said Larit’s name was also included in a ‘kill, kill, kill’ list of activists in Negros which was sent to the Karapatan national office’s public information desk through a text message just mere hours after the Bloody Sunday raids throughout the Southern Tagalog region last year.
- Impact of Event
- 1
- Gender of HRD
- Man
- Violation
- Abduction/Kidnapping
- Rights Concerned
- Right to healthy and safe environment
- HRD
- Community-based HRD
- Perpetrator-State
- Suspected state
- Source
- Monitoring Status
- Pending
- Event Location
Latitude: 10.676029984198621
Longitude: 122.95178555420107
- Event Location
- Summary for Publications
On 5 April 2022, Iver Larit, former political prisoner and community-based defender working for urban poor, went missing after being likely abducted by the police in Bacolod City, the Philippines.