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In the past three years, close to 40 nations have been signing a resolution, initiated by Iceland, expressing concern over the rising number of killings related to President Duterte’s “war on drugs.” Initially they urged the Philippine government to stop the killings and undertake an impartial investigation on these cases.

Subsequently they called on the government to accept a visit by Agnes Callamard, the UN special rapporteur on summary or arbitrary executions (“extrajudicial killings” or EJKs to human rights groups), and to facilitate an investigation “without conditions or limitations.” But President Duterte rejected the idea, even threatening to slap Callamard if she insisted on coming to the country, because of some remarks she had made which administration officials interpreted to be bias on her part.

Last Thursday, the 47-member UN Human Rights Council (meeting in its 41st session in Geneva which ends today) adopted the Iceland-initiated resolution by a vote of 18 in favor, 14 opposed, and 15 abstaining.

Essentially, the resolution urges three actions:

• It calls on the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, to produce a “comprehensive written report” on the human rights situation in the Philippines and present the report to the UNHRC ‘s 44th session for extensive discussion;

• The Philippine government is asked to cooperate with Bachelet’s office by, among others, “facilitating country visits [of UN special rapporteurs] and refraining from all acts of intimidation or retaliation”on human rights defenders; and

• It calls on the government to “take all necessary measures” to prevent EJKs and enforced disappearances, conduct impartial investigations of human rights violations and to “hold perpetrators responsible in accordance with international norms and standards including due process and the rule of law.”

Human rights advocates, both in the country and abroad, welcomed the UNHRC adoption of the resolution.

It was called by Karapatan a “decision on the side of justice… a significant step towards accountability…” seeing it as the start of “close [international] monitoring” that would also move forward other efforts in the Philippines, in Asia and at the international level. The National Union of People’s Lawyers (NUPL) discerned “an initial benchmark victory of sorts in the long and arduous search for justice” that brings a “ray of hope” that the killings will stop and impunity will end.

Human Rights Watch found the resolution as a “modest but vital measure” as it called out the government’s harsh criticisms of Iceland and the other states that supported the resolution. “Countries determined to address the human rights crisis in the Philippines,” it noted, “prevailed in the face of Manila’s ultimately counterproductive efforts to shield itself from scrutiny.”

However, the Philippine government, through Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro L. Locsin Jr., rejected the resolution in an official statement, calling it a “politically partisan and one-sided resolution, so detached from the truth on the ground.” Because of the relatively low number of votes of those who supported the resolution – yet accepted as valid by the UNHRC – Locsin said the resolution was “not universally adopted,” that “its validity is highly questionable.” Moreover, he regarded with contempt the countries which backed the resolution.

The Philippine diplomat lashed out at “western countries” who had committed human rights violations against the peoples they had colonized in the past, for thinking “that the world has forgotten what they did and what should have been done to them had there been a Human Rights Council.” He then accused them of seeking to bring down the Filipinos and the Philippines, with its “unblemished human rights record,” to the level of the “authors of atrocities the world must not forget.”

He likewise insulted the HRV victims and human rights defenders who have been crying out for justice, by claiming that the nations that backed the resolution had been “incited by false information from sources peddling their untruths for money, or who have allowed themselves to be played by the ill will of a few.”

Full-throatedly backing up Duterte’s repeated justifications for the continued killing of mostly poor people suspected of being drug suspects and pushers, Locsin declared: “The Philippines renews its solemn responsibility to protect the law-abiding against the lawless by any means efficient to achieve the defining purpose for the existence and expense of a state. To that responsibility, my President has made an iron, unwavering and total commitment; and it will not be weakened by this ill-fated resolution.”

Nonetheless, the country’s top diplomat didn’t close the door to Philippine participation in future actions by the UNHRC.

“The temptation is strong to walk away from all this with well-deserved contempt for the minority of countries that have the least moral standing to raise their false issues to the discredit of the (UNHRC),” Locsin said. “But the Philippines must remain true to the cause of human rights,” he added, “we will continue to work in the Council to advance a noble mandate to respect, protect and fulfill human rights, and rescue it from its misuse.”

Locsin appeared to have taken the cue from his principal, President Duterte, in a moment of rare soberness. Asked by reporters if he would allow UNHRC representatives to investigate in the Philippines, Duterte inconclusively replied, “Let them state their purpose and I will…” Recall that after the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, in 2017, persisted on conducting a preliminary examination on the drug-related EJKs, Duterte ordered the country’s withdrawal from the ICC. Curiously, it seemed that Duterte wouldn’t dare withdraw the Philippine membership from the UNHRC.

The DFA chief’s rhetoric, however, will not determine the outcome of the UNHRC action. High Commissioner Bachelet – who fought and survived the Pinochet dictatorship – made a statement before that body in March 2018 that set the tone on how matters will go from here.

“The drug policies in place in the Philippines and its lack of respect for the rule of law and international standards,” she declared, “shouldn’t be considered a model for any country.”

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Email: satur.ocampo@gmail.com

Published in Philippine Star
July 13, 2019

The post UN human rights body presses Phl gov’t on EJKs appeared first on Bulatlat.

The officials of the Duterte regime contradict themselves and each other daily and almost by the hour. They have, individually and collectively, outdone and are outdoing every other administration in the incoherence, contradictions, unreason, and non sequiturs of their declarations. A reality that is arguably as alarming as the lawlessness and the extrajudicial killings that are continuing to ravage the ranks of human rights defenders, political activists, and regime critics, it is specially evident in their foreign policy discourse.

Foreign policy should serve and advance national interests, but there is hardly any evidence that that principle guides the regime. The incoherence and contradictions in its approach to foreign relations are particularly evident in the public declarations of Mr. Duterte, whose half finished sentences, profanities, fraudulent claims, and even worse logic contribute little if at all to citizen understanding of what his foreign policy is, much less to any illumination of such issues as China’s occupation and militarization of the West Philippine Sea (WPS).

His latest venture into what is for him the rarified air of foreign relations is illustrative. Speaking in Leyte last week, Mr. Duterte implied that if the United States of America ever declares war against China and even “fires the first shot” it would be defeated by the armed forces of his Chinese friends. He also suggested that, having failed to prevent China’s militarization of the West Philippine Sea, the US is egging him on to wage war against that country.

In another mish-mash of claims based on the assumption that only war could have stopped Chinese aggression in the WPS, Mr. Duterte also used the occasion to woo the police and military, whose support he has been courting out of his fears of a coup d’état, by validating their historic inability to defend this country from external threats by saying that he does not want to risk the lives of “[his] soldiers” to defend Philippine sovereignty.

Although a lawyer, he failed to point out that the Philippines has sovereign rights over those portions of the WPS that are part of the country’s territorial waters and Exclusive Economic Zone as mandated by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and by the 2016 ruling of the UN Arbitral Tribunal.

Mr. Duterte was also gravely mistaken on several counts. He said the US has to make the first move against China before the Philippines can invoke the Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT). Under its terms, the Philippines can invoke the MDT if it is under threat. An attack on the Philippines by a third party can also provoke a US response. The latter possibility has in fact been emphasized by both US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo as well as by US Ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim. Kim recalled Pompeo’s declaration about the US’ commitment to meeting its MDT obligations during his visit to the Philippines earlier this year. The US ambassador was clearly conveying to China his country’s warning that any other “incident” involving its armed forces similar to the June 9 ramming and sinking of the Filipino fishing boat F/B Gem-Vir would “trigger” a US response.

Mr. Duterte has made much of his allegedly “independent” foreign policy as a justification for his bias for China. He wants Filipinos and the world to believe that he’s setting the country free from US influence and dependency. But his blaming the US for allowing China’s occupation of the West Philippine Sea assumes that rather than the Philippines, it is the US that is responsible for the defense of Philippine interests. And quite contrary to his earlier claims, that dependency is actually unabating, with US military aid to his regime even increasing.

Meanwhile, his implication that the US will lose in any confrontation with its imperialist rival is totally baseless. With two million men and women under arms, China does have the largest standing army in the world. But its weaponry is far from as developed as that of the US. Surrounded by US military bases, and its cities vulnerable to long-range US missiles and nuclear bombers, China’s leaders do not want a war they will surely lose, focused as they are on their country’s continuing economic development.

Not that they’re moved by benign means and motives. But the most that country is doing to force others to do its bidding is to intimidate smaller countries like the Philippines over whose military capabilities it has the advantage, and to use its economic power to bring them into its orbit. But it has also demonstrated its unwillingness and inability to do anything militarily against those countries that have stood up to it, among them Indonesia and Vietnam in Southeast Asia and Argentina in Latin America.

If there is anything consistent in Mr. Duterte’s confused and confusing foreign policy narrative regarding China, it is his insistence that only war is the alternative to allowing that country free rein in Philippine territorial waters and even to exploit, deplete and destroy the country’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EZZ).

The reality he won’t accept is that, as Indonesia and Vietnam have done, the Philippines could have declared those waters and its EEZ off-limits to other countries while it protests Chinese incursions before world bodies like the United Nations. Unfortunately, Mr. Duterte has already declared the Philippine case lost by saying, even before it does anything, that it can’t win a war against China and that the UN is useless. He has also discouraged the Philippine Navy and Coast Guard from protecting Filipino fishermen by saying he won’t risk their lives to do that, in effect instead risking the lives and livelihoods of the country’s fisherfolk.

Either Mr. Duterte is severely disinformed and fact-challenged about what is at stake for the Philippines in the WPS, or he’s pretending to be so because of some secret pact with China similar to his agreement with its President Xi Jinping to allow Chinese fishermen free access to the EEZ in clear violation of the Philippine Constitution. If the latter is indeed the case, he does have a foreign policy despite suspicions to the contrary — and it can be summed up in one phrase: submission to China no matter the cost to the country of which he happens to be President.

In any case, whether Mr. Duterte’s agreement with Xi was a policy or not was itself another occasion for his own leading officials to contradict each other. His mouthpiece, Salvador Panelo, said it was binding, but later denied its existence. His Foreign Secretary, who incidentally said “f–k the international community” on Twitter while claiming to be the regime vanguard against stupidity, said it is not a policy, in one more vivid demonstration of the incoherence that characterizes regime discourse on practically every issue.

The inevitable conclusion is that these worthies are not even talking to each other to get their stories right, let alone consulting each other and even their boss of bosses. But that is not the worst part.

What is chilling is that what passes for foreign and domestic policies in the Duterte administration, rather than based on well-thought-out rational analysis, are merely what happens to cross the mind of Mr. Duterte as he gropes for words to justify what he has already decided to do for his, his family’s, his cronies’, and his foreign patrons’ benefit regardless of its consequences to this country, its people, and its future. He’s just winging it in the worst sense of that phrase — and it shows. In the process he has brought this country closer and closer to the brink of total ruin.

Luis V. Teodoro is on Facebook and Twitter (@luisteodoro).

www.luisteodoro.com

Published in Business World
July 11, 2019

The post Winging it appeared first on Bulatlat.