AUSTRALIAN Foreign Minister Julie Bishop belied claims made by President Rodrigo Duterte who had said that the Australian envoy never raised the issue of human rights or the thousands of Filipinos killed in his bloody war on drugs when they met in Davao City last week.
In a statement to Fairfax Media published on The Sydney Morning Herald on Monday, Bishop contradicted Duterte’s claims when she relayed her country’s concerns with respect to killings related to Duterte’s war on drugs.
“I conveyed Australian and international concerns with respect to extrajudicial killings and spoke of the importance we attach to human rights and the rule of law,” she said.
Bishop also told the New South Wales-based The Australian that “during my conversation with President Duterte we discussed the country’s anti-drug campaign at length.”
“I also raised the issue with three senior ministers and I met with a member of the human rights commission and other human rights advocacy groups,” she added.
Duterte, who had nothing but praise for Bishop, claimed that the Australian diplomat “never discussed human rights.”
“Because if you say that, if you utter those things in my presence, you’ll get an insult. So what we did was to discuss transnational crimes, terrorism,” he said in a media interview in Nay Pyi Taw, Myanmar.
“Australia? I will not pick a fight. Do not ever do that because if you can say one bad thing about me I can say five things bad about you,” he said, adding that he was “on the right track” on human rights.
Despite this, the Palace maintains that there was never a contradiction between the Australian official and the Philippine president, but “just a difference in perspective.”
“Since they had a productive dialogue which emphasized possible areas of constructive cooperation on the war against illegal drugs, [President Duterte] did not deem it sufficient to mention as having been discussed,” Presidential Spokesperson Ernesto Abella said.
“On the whole, the meeting was positive and just affirmed the growing Philippine-Australia relations,” he added.
Bishop earlier said she would “emphasize the importance of upholding human rights and the rule of law” with Duterte, whose eight-month drug war has resulted into thousands of alleged extrajudicial deaths since he took office.