MANILA, Philippines — “President Rodrigo Duterte has unleashed a human rights calamity on the Philippines in his first year in office” with a “murderous” war on drugs, overcrowded jails and “the harassment and prosecution of drug war critics,” an international watchdog group said Wednesday.
Human Rights Watch, which has been critical of the former mayor of Davao City, where he allegedly created a death squad responsible for hundreds of deaths, said in a statement that there has been “a steep decline in respect for basic rights since Duterte’s inauguration on June 30, 2016.”
The group said the administration “has rejected all domestic and international calls for accountability for these abuses, and instead has denied any government responsibility for the thousands of drug war deaths” — at least 7,000 according to HRW’s estimates but with other tallies placing the current total at more than 12,000.
“President Duterte took office promising to protect human rights, but has instead spent his first year in office as a boisterous instigator for an unlawful killing campaign,” Phelim Kine, HRW’s deputy Asia director, said. “Duterte has supported and incited ‘drug war’ killings while retaliating against those fearless enough to challenge his assault on human rights.”
An earlier investigation by HRW found what it called “a pattern of unlawful police conduct designed to paint a veneer of legality over extrajudicial executions that may amount to crimes against humanity.”
The group said Duterte’s drug war “has also worsened the already dire conditions of Philippine jail facilities, including inadequate food and unsanitary conditions,” citing government data showing 132,000 detainees, the bulk of whom are yet to be convicted, crammed into facilities built to hold a maximum of slightly over 20,000.
It said the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology “attributes the overcrowding to the arrest of tens of thousands of suspected drug users and dealers since the anti-drug campaign began.”
This does not count alleged “secret jails” where HRW said “police unlawfully detain suspects and demand bribes in exchange for release,” such as that recently discovered in a Manila police station.
Aside from allegedly subjecting “prominent critics of the government’s anti-drug campaign to harassment, intimidation, and even arrest,” HRW also noted “other critics of the killings — including activists, journalists, international officials, and ordinary Filipinos — have been threatened online by pro-Duterte supporters and trolls,” among them United Nations special rapporteur Agnes Callamard, who Duterte has publicly cursed for wanting to visit the country to probe the drug war deaths.
Kine said the situation has made an international investigation led by the UN “desperately needed to help stop the slaughter and press for accountability for Duterte’s human rights catastrophe.”
