STATEMENT OF SENATOR RICHARD J. GORDON ON THE RELEASE OF DOCTOR-HUMAN RIGHTS ADVOCATE DR. NATY CASTRO
March 31, 2022

We are elated upon learning the release of Dr. Maria Natividad "Naty" Castro, a brilliant and humane physician, who was detained illegally and held incommunicado, breaking the safeguards posed by the Constitution.

The 1987 Constitution, Article III (Bill of Rights), Section 12, paragraph 2 states that "[n]o torture, force, violence, threat, intimidation, or any other means which vitiate the free will shall be used against him. Secret detention places, solitary, incommunicado, or other similar forms of detention are prohibited."

She, like everybody else, is protected by law, which clearly states that a person must enjoy the right to due process, but was scrapped when she was not afforded it.

What Dr. Castro went through became a dangerous precedent in the prevention of innocent people exposed to the risk of illegal detention, which was piled up by mental and physical anguish during incarceration.

We are a democracy, and as such, our government should act like one in upholding the rights and liberties of every citizen, where every suspect is presumed innocent until proven otherwise in a court of law.