President Rodrigo Duterte has fulfilled his promise “to reduce inequalities and advance human rights” despite criticism over his administration’s war against illegal drugs, Malacañang said.
In celebration of International Human Rights Day, Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea said Duterte “consistently introduced and implemented programs and projects to reduce inequalities and advance human rights” in the country.
A statement signed by Medialdea and read by acting presidential spokesman Karlo Nograles said: “More than five years ago, the President made a promise that his administration will pursue social justice based on equal treatment and protection for our country’s poorest and most vulnerable, bring about improvement in our people’s welfare and standard of living, and make human rights work to uplift human dignity.”
“We all have seen those promises fulfilled even in the midst of a pandemic, which has affected us all,” Medialdea added.
Medialdea said these initiatives included unprecedented free tertiary education; universal access to health care; a massive-scale infrastructure development in the form of the Build, Build, Build program; social amelioration to broaden the Filipino middle class; and an aggressive campaign to contain the COVID-19 pandemic’s surge and its ill-effects on people’s health and the economy.
"Further, the administration had given its utmost effort to curb the proliferation of illegal drugs and criminality, to put an end to the decades-long struggle against local and international terrorists, and to eliminate deeply-entrenched corruption in many government offices,” he said
Duterte’s war against illegal drugs, however, has earned him the criticism of human rights champions here and abroad due to alleged extrajudicial killings that the Department of Justice continues to investigate.