“These killings suggest Duterte’s aggressive rhetoric advocating violent, extrajudicial solutions to criminality in the Philippines has found a receptive audience”, Kine said, recalling that last month, “he exhorted Filipinos who knew of any drug addicts to “go ahead and kill them yourself as getting their parents to do it would be too painful”.
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As a protocol, Yasay said they should have first requested the Philippine government if they could investigate the extra-judicial killings that had sparked alarm from human rights groups, the Catholic Church and the United States.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte attends during the 115th Police Service Anniversary at the Philippine National Police headquarters in Manila, Philippines, Aug. 17, 2016.
Yasay lamented that Special Rapporteurs Agnes Callamard and Dainius Puras, who called on the Duterte administration to end all drug-related killings, “made assumptions” based on media reports before they could even conduct an independent probe.
Toner said there was no question of the United States turning a blind eye to rights abuses and that the relationship with Manila, while good, was “frank and candid”.
Two UN envoys earlier claimed that Duterte’s shoot-to-kill order against drug suspects amounted to “incitement to violence and killing, a crime under global law”.
The president’s erratic statements and the fast-rising death toll have raised fears in the business community that foreign governments and investors will be scared away, undoing the work of Mr. Duterte’s predecessor, Benigno Aquino, who was widely credited with restoring the Philippines’ economic credibility.
On Monday Foreign Affairs Secretary Perfecto Yasay said that the Philippines would never really quit the U.N. The president had been “tired, disappointed [and] hungry” when he made his remarks at around 1 a.m. on Sunday, he said.
“We are certainly not leaving the UN”, Yasay told reporters in a news briefing. US officials declined comment on Duterte’s United Nations remarks.
The HRW official called on other countries, including the USA and European Union, to “make it clear to Duterte that inciting such violence is unacceptable and will reap potentially severe diplomatic and economic costs, beyond the human one”.
“It is highly irresponsible on their part to exclusively rely on such allegations based on information from unnamed sources without proper substantiation”, he said of the UN.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in June also strongly criticized Duterte, who during the election campaign promised to kill 100,000 people and dump so many bodies in Manila Bay that the fish would grow fat from feeding on them.
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Senator Leila de Lima, a staunch critic of the president, started a two-day congressional inquiry into the killings on Monday, questioning top police and anti-narcotics officials to explain the “unprecedented” rise in killings. “What is particularly worrisome is that the campaign against drugs seems to be an excuse for some law enforcers and other elements like vigilantes to commit murder with impunity”, De Lima said.
