The government isn’t sitting down on the thousands of deaths as a result of the bloody drug war waged by the Duterte administration, Malacañang said Thursday amid criticisms by New York-based Human Rights Watch for calling the first year of the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte a “human rights calamity.”
“The government is not sitting down, watching lives being wasted just like—just this way,” Communications Assistant Secretary Ana Marie Paz Banaag said in a Palace news briefing.
Banaag said that the HRW seemed to have overlooked the gains achieved under Duterte’s presidency, especially in the war on drugs.
“We don’t feel good about the comments of the Human Rights Watch. We have to realize that the President stood and won on a platform of genuine change,” she said. “Human Rights Watch should not brush aside all the programs especially on the enforcement side [of the war on drugs].”The government has made “so much sacrifice” after carrying out about 62,000 anti-illegal drug operations in trying to weed out the illegal drug menace, Banaag added.
“It is not a joke to enforce 62,000 anti-drug operations in here. That’s so much sacrifice and of course also we have around 1.3 million drug surrenderers. These things, the government is doing something about this through the inter-agency committee on anti-illegal drugs,” she said.
The New York-based group said Duterte’s “murderous ‘war on drugs,’ drug-related overcrowding of jails, and the harassment and prosecution of drug war critics has caused a steep decline in respect for basic rights since Duterte’s inauguration on June 30, 2016.
“Soon as getting into office, Duterte waged his controversial drug war resulting to more than 3,151 deaths from July 1, 2016 to June 13, 2016 alone, according to government statistics. Official data from the Philippine National Police have also pegged the total number of homicide cases at 9,432 from July 2016 to March 2017.
Of this number, 1,847 deaths were said to be drug-related, while 1,894 were not. The remaining 5,691 cases, approximately 60 percent of the total figure, were still under investigation.
Duterte’s anti-narcotics drive has also resulted in a 26.45 percent drop in the estimated total drug market, and 28.57 percent reduction in index crime, according to PNP data.
Government data showed that authorities have facilitated the surrender of 1,304,795 drug personalities from July 1, 2016 to June 6, 2017.