President Benigno Aquino III today, Human Rights Day, ordered the Department of Justice to withdraw the military’s trump charges against 43 health workers, bowing to national and international pressure over their illegal and arbitrary arrest, detention, torture and questionable circumstances surrounding their prosecution.

Known as Morong 43, the health workers started a hunger strike recently to heighten their vehement protest over their incarceration since members of the military swooped on the rest house in the town of Morong in Rizal province where they were holding a health care training.

Prior to his announcement today, Aquino has refused to order the DOJ to drop the charges and preferred to let the court decide on the merits of their arrest and detention.

Various national and international organizations, churches, institutions, members of the House of Representatives and the Senate as well as the National Democratic Front, and the Commission on Human Rights, have pressed for their release.

Aquino’s father, former Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr., was himself subjected to illegal arrest, detention and prosecution under the Marcos dictatorship in 1972. The elder Aquino also held a hunger strike to dramatize his and other anti-Marcos oppositionists and activists’ dissent against the martial law regime.

Referring to the Morong 43 today, Aquino said:

We recognize that their right to due process was denied them.  As a government that is committed to the rule of law and the rights of man, this cannot stand. Therefore, I have ordered the DOJ to withdraw the informations filed before the court. This will, in effect, subject to court approval, free those among them who have no other standing warrants in other courts.

The criminalization of suspected communists and communist sympathizers has been the hallmark of counter-insurgency operations especially under Aquino’s predecessor, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Red-baiting and red-tagging usually precede extrajudicial killings or enforced disappearances of activists, workers, farmers, students lawyers, church members and other civilians suspected by the military to have ties with the communist underground.

Human rights watchdog Karapatan recently stated in its Human Rights 2010 report that 20 Filipinos have been felled by extrajudicial killings under Aquino, as well as 16 who were tortured. It added that there are 371 political prisoners across the country.