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The Bureau of Immigration (BI) said on Monday, March 8, that it has denied the appeal of Dutch missionary and labor rights advocate Otto de Vries to overturn the cancellation of his residence visa.
The BI said that in a February 26 order, its Board of Commissioners maintained its ruling to cancel De Vries’ permanent visa due to his failure to provide evidence to reverse this decision.
Aside from the cancellation of his visa, the Dutch missionary has been ordered to immediately leave the country. He has been tagged as an undesirable alien, and has been included in the BI’s blacklist.
BI canceled his visa following information from National Intelligence Coordinating Agency (NICA) that de Vries actively participated in several protest rallies in Mendiola and Pasig.
BI Commissioner Jaime Morente emphasized that foreign nationals should not participate in partisan political activities in the country.
“There were photos of him engaged in several rallies in the country. Foreigners have no business joining such activities as it is a clear violation of their conditions of stay,” said Morente.
De Vries, who is a lay missionary from the Diocese of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, is working with the Ecumenical Institute of Labor Education and Research (EILER), a nongovernmental labor organization in the Philippines formally established in 1981.
He wrote a study about the labor situation in the country and discovered how poor the condition of Filipino laborers under the subcontractual system.
In a statement, EILER condemned the BI ruling on De Vries.
“The Bureau of Immigration is swift to blindly accept NICA’s preposterous report on Otto’s supposed participation in ‘terrorist activities’ when in fact Otto has only been fulfilling his duties as a lay missionary in service of the workers,” said EILER executive director Rochelle Porras in a statement Sunday, March 7.
“What do we make of a government agency that all too quickly drives away foreign missionaries like Otto and Sister Patricia Fox, but fails to recognize their decades of service to the Filipino people?” Porras added.
Before De Vries, at least 4 foreign missionaries had already been deported under Duterte administration. Among them was Sister Patricia Fox, an Australian nun who criticized the administration’s war on drugs. – Rappler.com
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