THE Senate committee on justice last week wrapped up its investigation of the rise in drug-related killings since the Duterte administration took power, concluding that law enforcement agencies are following due process in their war on illegal drugs.
The conclusion seemed counterintuitive, given the 3,700 drug-related killings since June, more than 1,000 of them deemed summary executions.
But the chairman of the committee, Senator Richard Gordon, said that after hours of grilling by senators, top police officials gave the impression that there is an effort to carry out the anti-drug campaign properly, within legal limits. The most the police got during the hearings was a scolding for not moving faster to solve the extrajudicial killings.
“The way I am looking at it, the policemen who reported here, looks like you guys…are doing your job,” Gordon said, praising the Philippine National Police at the end of hearings that were often contentious.
Amid international condemnation of the high death toll and the number of extrajudicial killings, the Palace quickly seized on Gordon’s remarks as proof that none of the killings were state-sanctioned.
The process by which the Senate committee reached its conclusion, however, tarnished the credibility of its findings at every step of the way.
First, when Senator Leila de Lima was still the head of the committee, she allowed her personal and political biases against President Rodrigo Duterte steer her off course, casting a shadow on the proceedings.
De Lima, a staunch opponent of Duterte, did herself no favors by straying from the scope of the investigation she initiated—which was to investigate the extrajudicial killings after the President came to power. Instead, she introduced a witness who was clearly aimed at discrediting the President, based on his record as a mayor, reviving old accusations that he had been behind the so-called Davao Death Squad.
De Lima’s motives were unabashedly political and it was obvious that she hoped to do by publicity what she was unable to do by law in her many years as chairman of the Commission on Human Rights and Justice secretary—pin Duterte down on human rights abuses.
In doing so, she hijacked the Senate investigation, steered it toward her own objective, and tarnished its credibility.
Her sudden replacement by Gordon, a Duterte ally, cast further doubts on the credibility of the process. The verbal tussles that followed between the prickly Gordon and the combative De Lima generated heat but shed no new light on the subject of the investigation.
Given that De Lima herself had overstepped the bounds of the investigation, it was no surprise that Gordon threw out the witness she introduced. But when Gordon also refused to allow the Commission on Human Rights to testify over some perceived slight, this made his findings less believable.
His promise to include sworn statements from the CHR as part of the committee report certainly was not equivalent to a public airing of perceived human rights abuses that Gordon’s panel ought to have investigated.
In closing, Gordon urged the police to respect human rights at all level of their jobs because the privileges of carrying a firearm to enforce the law comes with a great privilege of trust.
It was vital, he said, to show the world that Filipinos were capable of running a democracy, and that when we see a wrong, we will right it.
True as these sentiments might be, Senator Gordon ought to know that wishing doesn’t make it so, and closing his panel’s investigation by no means closes the book on extrajudicial killings.
