An organization of lawyers on Tuesday, Oct. 20, expressed concerns that the recently released implementing rules and regulations (IRR) may have made the Anti-Terrorism Act worse.

The Public Interest Law Center (PILC) prodded the Supreme Court (SC) to grant all 37 petitions which sought to nullify, either in parts or as a whole, the Anti-Terrorism Act for being unconstitutional.

“We entreat the Supreme Court to quickly act on the petitions before it, including ours filed by members of the religious community who are presently and actually being charged in courts today for daring to speak and work against government’s anti-people policies. Every day that passes with this law in place, is a day spent in terror and unjustness,” the group said in a statement.

The PILC explained its firm opposition against the law is “hinged on the vagueness of the law, its lack of safeguards for the innocent, and its grave violation of constitutional rights.”

With the recent release of the law’s IRR, the group lamented that the IRR may have made the Anti-Terrorism Law worse by giving it “carte blanche to terrorize.”

“Issuance of the Implementing Rules and Regulations of the terror law sets the state’s draconian powers in full throttle,” it stated.

Among its observations of the IRR concerns with what the PILC claims to be the Anti-Terrorism Law’s provision that “wrongfully authorizes the Anti-Terrorism Council (ATC) to detain and designate persons suspected of committing ‘terrorist acts’, as vaguely defined.”

“The IRR makes this worse. Section 9.1 of the IRR allows any law enforcement officer to arrest a suspect even without prior written authorization from the ATC. It is like giving the police a blank check where they can list any person they choose to arrest,” the group explained.

“That the written authorization can be obtained after the arrest, as the IRR provides, reveals its irrelevance and that it is merely meant to deceive the public,” it added.

Also, the group said the IRR’s rules concerning the ATC’s power to designate terrorists “shows how the government can unilaterally declare persons and groups as terrorists, without prior notice or hearing.”

“Akin to the notorious and dreaded drug lists of the Duterte administration’s ‘tokhang’ policy, designation is a blatant flex of force,” the PILC said.

“No amount of post-designation remedy, not even delisting, will repair the damage done,” it pointed out.

The PILC reminded that the ATC is “not a court of law” and is “part of the Executive Department” which has been “brazen and routine in calling activists as ‘terrorists’ and conjuring alleged ouster plots by the opposition.”