MANILA (UPDATE) - Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon has filed a measure that seeks a 10-year imprisonment for any state agent who would be convicted of “red-tagging.”

Under Senate Bill 2121 or the proposed “Act Defining and Penalizing Red-tagging” that Drilon filed on Wednesday, the convict will also be disqualified from holding any public office.

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“The passage of this bill will reverse the ‘increasingly institutionalization and normalization of human rights violations’ and put a stop on the attacks against the members of the legal profession,” Drilon said in the bill’s explanatory note.

“The measure will likewise serve as a reminder to the government of its primary duty under the Constitution to serve and protect the people,” he added.

The bill classifies red-tagging as “labeling, vilifying, branding, naming, accusing, harassing, persecuting, stereotyping, or caricaturing individuals, groups, or organizations as state enemies, left-leaning, subversives, communists, or terrorists as part of a counter-insurgency or anti-terrorism strategy or program, by any state actor, such as law enforcement agent, paramilitary, or military personnel.”

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Drilon said a statute of this kind is needed since libel and grave threats charges are not appropriate when a state agent is affecting an individual’s basic rights.

“It has resulted in serious human rights violations such as harassments, arbitrary arrests, detentions, and enforced disappearances… In some instances, being red-tagged is a prelude to death,” he said.

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Drilon and other members of the Senate earlier filed and adopted Senate Resolution 691 which strongly condemns the “killing of and acts of violence against judges, prosecutors and lawyers.”

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