The Free Legal Assistance Group has criticized the plans of President-elect Rodrigo Duterte to revive the death penalty and adopt a shoot-to-kill policy among other ways to fight criminality in the country.
FLAG, through its chairman Jose Manuel Diokno, who is also dean of the De La Salle University College of Law, expressed alarm over Duterte’s plan which was allegedly unconstitutional.
Diokno said the FLAG, which was founded by volunteer lawyers in 1974 to provide legal aid to victims of Martial Law, took the position that “these actions are illegal and unconstitutional, render our legal system impotent and meaningless, and blatantly violate international law.”
The group argued that the “shoot-to-kill” proposal would violate the constitutional provision, which states that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without the due process of law.
FLAG also cited Article 11 of the Revised Penal Code, which limits the use of deadly force by authorities to reasonably necessary situations.
“The shoot-to-kill policy gives unbridled discretion to law enforcement officers to take the law into their own hands and act as judge, jury, and executioner,” FLAG said, in a statement.
As for the death penalty, the group argued that it is anti-poor since most of the convicted heinous criminals cannot afford competent lawyers.
“The poor are vulnerable to the death penalty because they have no voice, no money, no power, and lack the resources to hire good lawyers. For exactly the same reasons, they will also be vulnerable to the proposed ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy of the president-elect,” they said.
The FLAG lawyers added that the country would also violate the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights it signed on Sept. 20, 2006 and was ratified on Nov. 20, 2007 “without reservation” should it restore the death penalty.
“The Second Optional Protocol is the only international treaty of worldwide scope to prohibit executions and to provide for total abolition of the death penalty. States that ratify the Second Optional Protocol are required to renounce the use of the death penalty definitively,” FLAG stressed.
“If the Philippine reinstates capital punishment [after having ratified the Second Optional Protocol], the country would be condemned for violating international law. It would be a great stigma,” it added.
Several sectors, including the Commission on Human Rights and Catholic Church, have already opposed these plans of Duterte.