Scores of protesters burned American flags and tried to march to the US Embassy on Wednesday, to demand that a US Marine convicted of raping a Filipino woman be handed back to Makati jail.
About 80 activists from the leftwing umbrella group Bayan, the women's alliance Gabriela, and migrant workers' group Migrante denounced the transfer last month of Lance Corporal Daniel Smith from the Makati City jail to the US Embassy without a court order.
The protesters also demanded an end to joint US-Philippine military exercises and called for the 1998 Visiting Forces Agreement to be scrapped. The bilateral pact governs the conduct of US troops in the Philippines.
"The VFA must be terminated if we are to uphold what little is left of our avowed national sovereignty," said Bayan chairwoman Carol Araullo.
"The government ... has been a party to the escape of a convicted criminal, a rapist of a Filipina," Araullo said, adding that the VFA has been used as justification to ignore Philippine laws and rulings.
Anti-riot policemen stopped the protesters about a block from the embassy, where they burned giant US flags and pictures of US President George W. Bush and President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.
The Makati regional trial court sentenced Smith -- from St. Louis, Missouri -- to 40 years imprisonment and ordered him to be detained in Makati jail in December. Later that month, the Foreign Affairs Department agreed to move Smith to the US Embassy, following an announcement by US authorities they were canceling the 2007 military exercises, citing as reason Smith's continued detention in Philippine jail.
The transfer has elicited protests and prompted lawyers of the rape victim to file petitions in court seeking to hold in contempt Smith and officials concerned, and to declare the VFA unconstitutional. (AP)
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