PRESIDENT Rodrigo Duterte has initiated a “war on drugs” in which police and “unidentified gunmen” have killed several thousand people, Human Rights Watch says in its World Report 2017.
Carlos Conde of Human Rights Watch Philippines released the report to reporters on Friday.
Since taking office on June 30, 2016, Duterte and senior government officials have praised the killing of suspected drug dealers and drug users and resisted holding those responsible to account.
In the 687-page World Report, its 27th edition, Human Rights Watch reviewed human rights practices in more than 90 countries.
In his introductory essay, Executive Director Kenneth Roth wrote that a new generation of authoritarian populists seeks to overturn the concept of human rights protection, treating rights as an impediment to the majority will.
For those who feel left behind by the global economy and increasingly fear violent crime, civil society groups, the media, and the public have key roles to play in reaffirming the values on which rights-respecting democracy has been built.
“In the name of wiping out ‘drug crime,’ President Duterte has steamrolled human rights protections and elevated unlawful killings of criminal suspects to a cornerstone of government policy,” said Phelim Kine, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch.
“Friends of the Philippines need to make clear that it can’t be business as usual until the killings stop and there are meaningful moves toward accountability,” Kine said.
The Philippines has seen an unprecedented level of apparent summary killings by the police since Duterte took office.
Police statistics show that from July 1 to Nov. 25, the police killed an estimated 1,959 suspected “drug pushers and users.”
That death toll constitutes a nearly 20-fold jump over the 68 such police killings recorded between January 1 and June 15. Police statistics attribute an additional 3,658 killings to unknown vigilantes from July 1 to Nov. 23.
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings, Agnes Callamard, confirmed in November that she had accepted a government invitation to undertake a fact-finding mission in the Philippines in 2017.
Duterte has said the killings show the “success” of his anti-drug campaign and urged police to “seize the momentum.”
In August, Duterte warned that he would declare martial law if the judiciary obstructed his anti-drug campaign.
In September, the Senate ousted the head of the Senate Committee on Justice and Human Rights, Senator Leila De Lima, in apparent reprisal for her inquiry into the killings.
In November, Duterte announced he might suspend the writ of habeas corpus to intensify the campaign against illegal durgs.
In March, some 6,000 protesters, primarily indigenous peoples, farmers and their supporters from the drought-stricken areas in North Cotabato and Bukidnon provinces gathered in Kidapawan City in Mindanao, calling for government food aid and other assistance.
The police response included shooting live ammunition into the crowd, killing two people. Neither the Senate nor the police had released the results of their respective investigations into the incident, Kine said.
The Philippines is also recording one of Asia’s fastest-growing epidemics of the human immunodeficiency virus, driven by new infections among men who have sex with men.
The worsening HIV epidemic is driven by national, provincial and local government policies that are hostile to evidence-based policies and interventions including condom use, Kine said.