Children’s Rehabilitation Center (CRC) condemns the false accusations and the trumped up charges of frustrated murder and child abuse filed against Lindy Trenilla, a social worker and currently the officer in-charge of Children’s Rehabilitation Center – Southern Mindanao Region Office.
Lindy Trenilla is a stalwart child rights worker who devoted her life in upholding and promoting the rights of Lumad children (Indigenous People) in Mindanao, and an Outstanding Social Worker in the Philippines Awardee of the Philippine Association of Social Workers Inc. (PASWI).
Trenilla has been subjected to numerous incidents of red-tagging, vilification, harassment, intimidation and threat by the state agents in Mindanao. Rather than giving credence to the valuable contributions of Trenilla and other social workers in advancing the rights of Filipino children especially those in the margin, the administration is scandalously wasting government resources in perpetuating political persecutions and in attacking civic and democratic spaces.
The filing of trumped up charges against Trenilla is a clear attestation that human rights workers are not safe from the attacks of the administration that maliciously equates development work and dissent to insurgency. Not even a pandemic can stop the Duterte administration from targeting Filipino Children and committing flagrant child rights violations. Worse, it also launched its precarious attacks against child rights defenders.
With the Anti-Terror Law in place, development work and advocacies for children’s rights can be easily seen by the government as terroristic acts. With the ATL vague provisions, our services for our children beneficiaries can be wrongly construed as activities supporting armed groups which will consequently impede the maximum delivery of services to children and put the safety of child rights workers at risk.
We firmly believe that the attacks against child rights defenders are also attacks to Filipino children. This saddening and alarming incident necessitates our immediate collective actions.
Thus, we call on all child- focused organizations and civil society groups to stand firm against these vicious attacks by calling for the immediate junking of the trumped up charges against her and by holding the Duterte administration accountable over the outright attacks against human rights defenders.
Likewise, we are also appealing to everyone to donate any amount to help us for the bail of Lindy Trenilla amounting to Php200,000. Your humble support for Lindy Trenilla and other individuals maliciously accused and charged is a call for justice. #