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4 things that can happen to make Duterte govt accountable for continued killings

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islander:

4 things that can happen to make Duterte govt accountable for continued killings

By Tricia Aquino, InterAksyon | Faith del Mundo, News5
October 9, 2017 


The body of a victim of an extra-judicial killing is seen dumped on a street. (Reuters)

MANILA – “The President is very clearly responsible for what’s happening on his watch.” That much was asserted by Human Rights Watch-Geneva Director John Fisher, who flew into the Philippines to see for himself the situation in the country, and to talk to families of victims of extrajudicial killings. He also listed four possible scenarios on how the Duterte administration might be pressed to be accountable for allowing the killings to spiral further.

In an interview with News5’s Faith del Mundo on Sunday, he explained that accountability takes place on a number of levels.

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islander:

“Obviously, those pulling the trigger or wielding a knife can be held personally responsible and accountable for their acts,” he said. “And there is the concept of command responsibility, where those who are issuing orders are also responsible for what’s taken place on their watch.”

Fisher continued, “If President (Rodrigo Duterte) is found to be inciting violence, to have knowledge of the campaign, to be inciting the campaign, to be giving orders or assurances of impunity, then of course he has responsibility for that. I mean, he’s the President of the country, he oversees the armed forces and police service, and his public statements have been very, very clear that he feels that those who are somehow associated with drug use or otherwise can and should be killed. He’s given assurances that there will be impunity for those who perpetrate these acts.”

The Philippine National Police claimed last week that there had been only one extrajudicial killing in the Phillippines since Duterte assumed office, then revised the number to zero.

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islander:

Fisher said this statement simply did not conform with the facts and the international definition of extrajudicial killings, especially since the PNP itself reported that there had been thousands of people killed during the conduct of the war on drugs.

He explained that extrajudicial killings are those done without a judicial or legal process.

“In any normal judicial process, there are arrest warrants, there’s a trial, a person we presume innocent until found guilty if there’s a conviction, there’s a sentence, and hearing, and a whole series of steps that can give all of us confidence that what’s happening is in conformity with the legal process, the judicial process,” he said.

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islander:

Fisher continued, “When the killing happens extrajudicially, it’s because the police or others take matters into their own hands and just kill a suspect without any of that. So those protections, those legal safeguards that give everyone the reassurance that the police are doing their jobs without exposing others to unnecessary risk” are lost.

In the case of the deaths in the Philippines, he claimed, there hadn’t been a judicial process, an attempt to bring it before a court, or a conviction.

“As there are thousands of deaths and more reported on a regular basis, the government can’t just define those bodies out of existence,” Fisher stressed. “They have to address the problem.”

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islander:

According to the Presidential Communications Operations Office, 3,906 “drug personalities” were killed in anti-drug operations from July 1, 2016 to September 26, 2017. Fisher compared this to Human Rights Watch’s report in the beginning of 2017, where it said 7,000 killings “seemed to have occurred in an extrajudicial fashion.”

He believed that the “staggering death toll” was just the tip of the iceberg, as there were probably many more deaths that weren’t being reported by the victims’ families to the authorities whom they saw as the perpetrators of the crime.

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