PHNOM PENH”•Newly appointed Foreign Affairs Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano said Wednesday night that one of the bigger challenges he would have to face as the country’s top diplomat would be to refrain from talking too much in public.
In a press briefing requested by Philippine media at the Himawari Hotel here, Cayetano said many things in diplomacy could not be spoken into the microphone.
“You gave me too much credit because I hold the microphone. Actually, the bigger challenge for me now is if politicians like microphones, diplomats should not engage in microphone diplomacy,” he said.
“It is different when you are implementing a strategy, when you are criticizing something. So that’s a bigger challenge for me.”
In other developments:
• Even if he hasn’t taken his oath yet as Foreign Affairs secretary, Senator Cayetano on Wednesday vowed to resign and get jailed if it could be proven that he misled a United Nations body in Geneva on the number of drug-related deaths under President Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody drug war.
Straight from Geneva where he tried to defend the country’s human rights record before the United Nations Periodic Review, Cayetano said he was willing to risk his new position if it could be proved that there was a “sudden wave” of state-sponsored extrajudicial killings in the Philippines.
• Cayetano should formally resign as a senator before assuming his new post, Senator Francis Escudero said Thursday.
He said Cayetano could not fully perform his new job as Foreign Affairs secretary until he quit the Senate.
“If he’s just acting, he cannot make permanent appointments, he cannot sign vouchers until he resigns as senator and until such time that he is formally confirmed by the Commission on Appointments,” Escudero said.
• A draft report by the Universal Periodic Review Working Group has called on the Philippines to end the extrajudicial killings that have claimed thousands of lives in the government’s war on drugs and scrap the plan of reimposing of death penalty.
The complete report will be made available late Thursday night, but the draft of the UPR Working Group said 257 recommendations to the Philippines were made by 95 participating states during the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Cayetano said it was the duty of the government to be transparent and to enlighten the public on all its policies.
But he said policy was different from strategy and his new post would preclude him from telegraphing the government’s hand in any negotiation.
“Sometimes, people want to question or discuss policies. But if you are in the middle of a struggle, you cannot lay your strategy before the world,” Cayetano said.
But he said he was willing to engage Congress, the media and other interest groups in private discussions.
“I would like to institutionalize more briefings that are off the record to the media, to the Senate, to the House and to other interested groups so that they will know the information that we know,” he said.
“Because sometimes we lack information but when we do those briefings, it’s with the understanding that there are things that are not for broadcast. For instance, negotiations. They need something, we need something. There are a lot of things about diplomacy that you cannot use the microphone.” With John Paolo Bencito, Macon Ramos-Araneta and Sara Susanne D. Fabunan