Incommunicado

          Incommunicado detention is not the same or cannot be compared to being at home. In fact, they are opposite. Being in your own home sure is the opposite of being detained by the State,  incommunicado.         

          I saw the spokesperson of Codal on TV this afternoon on the topic: anti-terrorism bill, he’s a friend,         and he said that being incommunicado is a human rights violation because “humans are social beings, you need to talk to somebody; being incommunicado is a violation of your rights, you need to talk to other people; it’s just like being at home and you’re not talking to anyone.”                

          I guess he meant something else or he was in a hurry to simplify things. Anyway.  (I was texting him  two weeks ago because  I found the file that he was asking for a long time ago (long story. Months ago I looked everywhere for weeks and weeks in the office in the house in the car in other people’s offices, you know, if you have a preconceived notion of where the file is,  and it isn’t there, you get disoriented. anyway. my balikbayan brother arrived a month ago and I cleaned a room that was not being used….. and there it was! in a box! I had tagged that box,  and the contents of that box was indexed in the flap of the box but the flap was folded and overlapped by another flap,  so I never saw the handwritten  index of the box.  And now it all came back: I did some re-filing when my other balikbayan brother arrived and I put away old old stuff.  And the moral of the story is, keep all your files in the office! Duh. That was really stupid on my part, it’s never happened before but I never had balikbayan guests before. Please send clients my apologies.) So no reply so I guess what I had was his old number. So I’m using my blog to text him. Duh. Anyway, it’s for a dual purpose.                            

           Being incommunicado detention cannot be compared to being at home and not talking to anyone.   I don’t know. Some people shut the door so the kids won’t bother them and bring their work home and their computers and everything  and not talk to anyone when they’re working. That’s not a human rights violation. Some people spend a day fasting or meditating or practising yoga and they’re at home and they don’t talk to anyone,  that’s not a human rights violation.                          

          So…… In a hurry to analogize.                                  

           Sometimes, when you’re on the phone and you don’t want to be bothered, you say “I am incommunicado”. Or when you’re whining to  others, you say “I’ve been incommunicado for days just working on this!” Or you say, “he is incommunicado” when you mean that a friend doesn’t want to be bothered. That’s probably what led to analogizing it that way.                                             The essence of why incommunicado detention is proscribed by the Bill of Rights is that: You are in the hands of the State. It is a form of illegal detention. You don’t have control of where you are. Of your movements. You are in the hands of hostile persons. You don’t have control of what you eat, when you will sleep if you will sleep, where you go, where you will relieve yourself,  or whether you would live or would get out of there alive. You don’t have control of whether you would stay alive or not. Nobody knows where you are. In fact, many of those extrajudicially executed started out as being in incommunicado detention.                                      

              And that’s why the two are opposite. Sometimes,  we try to simplify  things to make legal concepts understandable, and  if the effort is not studied,  the concepts become trivialized.  Hey,  I found the file, please give my profound apologies to the client. (I’m using by blog to text, this is horrible.)