Prosecution of former Communist Party Leader Stopped
Partial Success of the Philippine Communist Jose Maria Sison at the Dutch Court
(Translation from the German original) Tageszeitung junge Welt – Berlin Daily newspaper Young World – Berlin
15 May 2009 / Ausland – Foreign (News) / Page 6
The founding chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines, who has been living in exile for over 20 years in the Dutch (city) Utrecht, had reason for joy last weekend. His two latest publications “Democracy, Socialism and Peace” and “Democracy and Socialism against Imperialist Globalization” were presented in Amsterdam. At the same time, the 70-year-old Sison celebrated among his circle of friends and sympathizers the legal judgment issued by the Dutch (ministry of) justice on 30 March, whereby due to lack of proof on the charge of ordering murder was dropped. On 28 August 2007 Sison was arrested in Utrecht and detained in The Hague. The charge: he is supposed to have ordered the murder of two former comrades who worked for the Philippine military secret service. On the day of the arrest, police units searched the office of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, of which Sison has for years functioned as chief political adviser, as well as the residences of six other Party members. They confiscated several computers and numerous written material. For 19 months the representatives of the prosecution service traveled multiple times to the Philippines in order to hear witnesses (presented by the military secret service) and to look for materials for evidence. That the National Prosecution Service, in accordance with earlier decisions of the District and Appeal Courts in The Hague now proclaimed a stop the prosecution is evaluated by Sison’s defense, the law office of Bohler, Franken, Koppe and Wijngaarden and the former Filipino Judge at the UN, Romeo T. Capulong, as a significant partial success for their client.
Sison has the doubtful privilege, already in August 2002 as one of the few private persons placed on the “terrorlist” of the US-American and Dutch authorities, and later also of the EU. Now the lawyers of Sison hope to push through at the European Court in Luxembourg so that finally the accusations on the basis of which their client was entered into the “terror list” would be exposed and he would definitively be stricken off this list. Rev. Hans Visser of Committee Defend, which has stood up for the full rendering of justice to Sison (or restoring fully his good name, “volle Rehabilitation Sisons”), said in Amsterdam that those who should be in a “terror list” are not persons like Sison, but such capitalists who cause the actual economic and financial crisis and thereby deliberately sold out and threw millions of people worldwide into misery. #
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