178 Chasing the Wind: Assessing Philippine Democracy, Second Edition deemed illegitimate, invalid, and undemocratic. Whither to go from here? Thirty four concerned Filipino citizens (including myself) signed as “authors” of a formal petition sent, in May 2013, to the United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) wherein they complained of the violation of their basic rights under the provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), an international treaty to which the Philippines is a signatory. [The UNHRC is not to be confused with the UN Commission on Human Rights or its replacement, the Human Rights Council.] The UNHRC is a United Nations body made up of appointed experts who meet regularly to assess the compliance of 162 UN member states to the ICCPR. The UNHRC also is tasked with considering individual petitions relating to whether violations of the provisions of the ICCPR have been committed against citizens in the 114 countries that have ratied the Optional Protocol (the Philippines is one of these). In effect, the UNHRC functions “as a mechanism for the international redress of human rights abuses”. The concerned Filipino citizens are represented in this landmark action by legal counsels Harry Roque Jr, Gilbert Andres, Joel Butuyan, and Romel Bagares. In essence, the petitioners argued that “The Philippines has the obligation to ensure the authors' right to the free expression of their will as electors – as guaranteed under Article 25 of the ICCPR, during the 10 May 2010 and the 13 May 2013 automated elections.” The argument was that, pursuant to the aforementioned Article 25, “The security of ballot boxes must be guaranteed and votes should be counted in the presence of the candidates or their agents. There should be independent scrutiny of the voting and counting process and access to judicial review or other equivalent process so that electors have condence in the security of the ballot and the counting of the votes.” The petitioners also argued that “The Philippines violated the authors' right to the free expression of their will as electors during the 10 May 2010 automated elections, and continues to violate such right in its conduct of the 13 May 2013 automated elections – since it gave control of the public and private keys to all the PCOS machines to [foreign technology provider] Smartmatic.” Citing Comelec's Bid Bulletin No. 10, issued by Comelec's Bid and Awards Committee on 15 April 2009 (a public document), this “clearly states, inter alia, that the digital signature shall be assigned by the winning bidder to all members of the BEI and the BOC (whether city, municipal, provincial, district).” The petition also cited the opinion of IT professor Dr. Pablo Manalastas who stated, “Since Smartmatic has this responsibility [of generating the access keys], it will have possession of all BEI's private keys, and this will give Smartmatic the capability to change the ERs [Election Results] of any precinct in the entire country, resulting in massive computerized cheating in case this capability is exploited by Smartmatic.”