MANILA, Philippines — President Rodrigo Duterte and other government officials the International Criminal Court has been asked to investigate “cannot use the country’s sovereignty to hide the appalling climate of killing and impunity across the nation,” Senator Risa Hontiveros said Thursday.
At the same time, Hontiveros said she was “saddened that some members of the Senate of the Philippines were included in the communication of information filed before the ICC” and hoped “they will respond to these accusations appropriately and satisfactorily.”
The information filed with the ICC by lawyer Jude Sabio, counsel of Edgar Matobato, the self-confessed hitman of the Davao Death Squad allegedly created by Duterte when he was mayor of the Mindanao city, included Senators Richard Gordon and Alan Peter Cayetano among the 11 officials, aside from Duterte, whom he asked be investigated for crimes against humanity and mass murder.
The others are: Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre, Philippine National Police chief Ronald dela Rosa, Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez, sacked Interior Secretary Ismael Sueno, Superintendent Edilberto Leonardo, retired policeman Sanson “Sonny” Buenaventura, Superintendent Royina Garma, National Bureau of Investigation director Dante Gierran, and Solicitor General Jose Calida.
Gordon, who chairs the Senate Committee on Justice and Human Rights and sponsored Committee Report No. 18196, should be held liable, said Sabio, “for holding that there are extrajudicial killings committed by the PNP operating under Duterte administration’s campaign against drugs but ultimately concluding that these killings are not state-sponsored, thus, ending the Senate investigations on these killings.”
Cayetano, who ran but lost as Duterte’s vice president in the 2016 elections, is accused of “aiding and abetting the killings brought by the war on the drugs through his speeches and public pronouncements.”
As a party to the Rome Statute, which created the ICC, the Philippines “is part of a global community joined by the shared respect for democracy, human rights and dignity” and thus, has the “obligation to subject our public policies and even our leaders to scrutiny, in the same way that we may hold accountable the actions of other nation-states.”
