PRESIDENT Rodrigo Duterte on Wednesday downplayed Senator Leila De Lima’s petition seeking to prohibit him from securing private details about her personal life.
He insisted on her culpability for the proliferation of illegal drugs inside the national penitentiary.
“I don’t know what are my sins, so I’d rather leave it to the court,” Duterte said.
“Mine was just to make public what was or is the corruption of the day and how drugs flourish inside our penal institutions.”
After Presidential Spokeman Ernesto Abella criticized De Lima for playing the “gender card” against President Rodrigo Duterte, De Lima said the the allegations against her were “unsubstantiated,” and that Abella was “missing the whole point.”
“I have nothing to hide and much less do I have any cause to deny any alleged involvement with the illegal drug trade or with any of its so-called drug lords that this administration has repeatedly and desperately insisted I have,” De Lima said in a statement.
Duterte said the further influx of narcotics inside the New Bilibid Prison was De Lima’s own doing, and that the entire narcotics network “have to be immobilized.”
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ordered the government and Senator Leila De Lima to explain their respective position on Delima’s petition questioning Duterte’s immunity from suit. It gave them 10 days to submit their respective memorandums.
De Lima had petitioned the Supreme Court to order the President and his men from collecting and using information about her private affairs “to degrade her dignity as a human being, a woman and a senator.”
De Lima cited several specific occasions where Duterte allegedly repeatedly subjected her to crude verbal attacks and the publication of her alleged personal affairs.
The President had earlier implicated De Lima in the illegal drug trade, suggesting that she had an illicit affair with her former driver Ronnie Dayan who protected the drug lords inside the New Bilibid Prison.
But Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Salvador Panelo said De Lima’s “test case” against the President was a “harassment suit.”
“The petition can only be a harassment suit, the purpose of which is to slow down [the] President’s war on illegal drugs and to distract the public from her inadequacies and inappropriate behavior as Secretary of Justice,” Panelo said in a statement.
“As the good senator ought to know, the main purpose of the President’s immunity is to protect him from any form of harassment, hindrance or distraction which can impair his ability to perform the functions entrusted to him by the Filipino people.”
Panelo was confident De Lima’s case against Duterte “will not pass judicial scrutiny.”