THE chief of the Philippine National Police, Ronald dela Rosa, on Friday defended the detention of a dozen men and women inside a cramped one-meter by three-meter secret cell at the Manila Police District 1 in Tondo.
“As long as the prisoners were not tortured or extorted, it’s okay with me,” he told reporters when asked about the discovery of the Commission on Human Rights during an announced visit to the station. Those detained in the hidden room, the size of a closet, had not yet been charged.
Cries of “here we are, here we are” were heard from behind a wall, according to the rights workers and journalists. The rights workers then found a hidden door behind a bookshelf, leading to the cell.
Stunned detainees came stumbling out of the room, some begging for water while others, in tears, pleaded with the rights workers not to abandon them.
The detainees said they had been held for about a week after being arrested on allegations of drug use or trafficking and that police were demanding hefty payments of up to P200,000 in exchange for their freedom.
“They were picked up on the pretext of drugs but they [the police] had not filed any charges against them,” said Gilbert Boisner, Manila director for the CHR who led the inspection.
The detainees also claimed that inadequate lighting, ventilation, and toilet facilities forced them “to urinate and do bowel movements in plastic bags,” Boisner said.
Yet all of this seemed all right to the PNP chief, who seemed to dismiss the accusations of extortion against the Tondo police out of hand.
Instead, Dela Rosa accused the CHR of plotting to embarrass the Duterte administration.
Nor does the police chief give allowance to the possibility that cramming 12 people into a one-meter by three-meter closet with no proper ventilation or toilet facilities and in 35 degree heat over an extended period of time might constitute “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment” that is barred by the Anti-Torture Act of 2009.
Regardless of what motives Dela Rosa ascribes to the CHR, it can be argued that the commission is only doing its job according to its constitutional mandate. The same might not be said about the police chief, whose subordinates had illegally detained and then strangled a Korean businessman inside the PNP headquarters in October in a despicable extortion attempt. Now he is defending the inhumane detention of drug suspects who have not even been charged.
The police chief got one more thing wrong—it is he, not the commission, that is an embarrassment to this administration.