007-Style of Killings in the Philippines

By: Joe Mauricio

 

The new President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, campaigned hard on no-nonsense approach to crime.And now, two months after he took office, we are getting a full impact of what exactly that means to those on the streets as it is emerging.

Shocking photographs on TV and prints for the world to see…like a shocking image of suspected drug dealers in front of his war against drugs, often bound hands and feet and shorts soaked in blood. Their faces covered with duct tapes and wearing signs proclaiming their alleged crimes on drugs.

This kind of 007-style of license to kill is officially sanctioned by the government. The legitimacy of deadly force usage is questioned by the United Nations Human Rights group— civilians murdered and bodies passed off as drug dealers or pushers to boost the PNP’s (Philippine National Police) kill rates.

Human murders of at least 1000 alleged drug dealers and violence and harassment toward suspected drug dealers marked a severed deterioration in human rights climates in the Philippines. These shocking development contrasted sharply with some positive rhetoric by President Duterte, recognizing the importance of civil society.

Many NGO’s are vulnerable to being targeted to the policy dictated by the President, which designates certain forms of defamation of accused drug dealers or sometimes of public officials or members of PNP designated as criminals or extremists. It has become alarming with the increasing numbers of deaths.

We, at VIA Times, are encouraging the Supreme Court of the Philippines to support pub lic interest litigation on behalf of the poor or marginalized sector of the country, accused as criminals by using a very broad interpretation of several articles of the Philippine Constitution. We should have a judicial response to continuing high-level of Philippine national violence in the country.

What’s going on in the Philippines by definition?

Extrajudicial killing is the killing of a person by the agencies of the government without the sanction of any judicial proceedings or legal process. Extrajudicial killings are mostly seen by the humanity to be unethical, since they bypass the due process of the legal jurisdiction in which they occur.

In the Philippines, extrajudicial killings often target suspected drug lords or dealers, and may be carried out by the Philppine National Police and the Armed Forces of the country.

The judiciary is the system of the courts that interprets and applies the laws of the state. The judiciary provides the mechanism for resolving the disputes.

In some nations under the doctrine of separation of powers, the judiciary gradually does not make law or enforce the law, but rather interprets and applies it to the fact of the case.

But what the citizenry is seeing is the horrific sights of dead people before the enforcement of the law, and even the interpretation of the law. Quo Vadis, Philippines?

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