Malacañang on Thursday again slammed American Senator Patrick Leahy and urged him to address the issues in his country instead of interfering in the affairs of other states.
“Mr. Leahy cannot be more popish than the Pope. It may be best for him to address the issues his country is facing rather than looking for other concerns which belong to a separate and independent state,” Presidential Spokesman Salvador Panelo said.
He made his statement even as Senator Leila de Lima slammed the Duterte administration for resorting to name-calling and attacks against US Senators Richard Durbin and Patrick Leahy, who proposed a visa ban to the government officials responsible for her imprisonment.
Rep. Pantaleon Alvarez had pounced on Durbin and called him a “moron” and “stupid” for supposedly interfering with domestic affairs, criticizing him for showing what he deemed as a “misguided messianic complex” for treating the Philippines as an American colony.
House Minority Leader Benny Abante Jr. said the US lawmakers were bullies pressuring Philippine officials into freeing De Lima.
The word war between Philippine officials and Leahy stemmed from the latter’s travel ban proposal against the Philippine officials behind the imprisonment of De Lima, a vocal critic of President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs.
Panelo criticized the proposal as an attempt to interfere with the country’s domestic affairs, while Leahy questioned the human rights situation in the Philippines.
Leahy’s spokesman David Carle earlier pointed to the alleged human rights abuses in the country recorded by the US last year.
Panelo said Leahy was “showing more ignorance and uttering amusing nonsense on a subject matter based on bogus narratives” from Duterte’s “vocal and noisy critics and detractors, which constitute a pathetic minority in the country.”
“The Filipino people, we believe, are the most reliable source of information on the human rights situation in the Philippines,” he said.
Panelo also insisted that De Lima was getting a “fair public trial as due process requires.”
De Lima has been held on drug charges since February 2017.
She has denied the allegations, dismissing them as political persecution. With Macon Ramos-Araneta
