THE Philippine delegation facing the UN Periodic Review in Geneva will “demolish” the negative perception attributed to President Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody drug war, a Palace official said Monday.
Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Salvador Panelo said the government delegation in Geneva could debunk the allegations of extrajudicial killings in the Duterte administration’s war on drugs.
He expressed optimism that the UN human rights body would accept “with open arms” the Philippines’ explanation of the real situation in the war on drugs.
“Certainly, I have no doubt about that, Panelo told reporters.
“Demolish. Demolish whatever black propaganda the other critics have sown against the President because the facts and figures speak for themselves. The evidence speak for itself.”
In other developments:
• If evidence shows that a police officer is involved in an extrajudicial killing, a case will be filed against him, Senator Alan Peter Cayetano on Monday told the Filipino community in Geneva.
Cayetano made this reassurance to Filipinos to stress that there was no “police immunity” as the reports claimed and that the government was doing its part to make sure that erring cops were punished.
He is in Geneva to lead a 16-member Philippine delegation tasked to attend the Universal Periodic Review on human rights where the states present their human rights records to the United Nations Human Rights Council.
• Detained Senator Leila De Lima on Monday slammed the Philippine delegation’s presentation on the Philippines’ anti-drug policy at the United Nations Human Rights Council, describing it as “misplaced bravado.”
“This early, said delegation is fooling itself that the international delegates to the periodic review are as stupid as the rest of the Malacañang cheering squad in their belief that they can pull off a magic trick and hide the Duterte regime’s record of [extrajudicial killings] and human rights abuses from the rest of the world,” De Lima said.
De Lima said that, this time, Cayetano’s audience was not a cyberspace inhabited by paid trolls and a bureaucracy made up of Duterte’s sycophants, but independent-minded envoys who were perfectly aware of the human rights situation in the Philippines.
Panelo accused the newspapers of reporting the wrong information on the President’s drug war.
“The report coming from newspapers are not really that accurate,” he said.
“After all, the newspapers also have been provided with the wrong info, so newspapers will have to report what information they receive.”
The human rights situation in the country was questioned during the third cycle of the Universal Periodic Review of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday.
Panelo also accused the Commission on Human Rights of nitpicking on the Duterte administration when it chose to be “selective” and instead focused on the allegations of extrajudicial killings under the Duterte regime.
He claimed that the CHR never bothered to investigate the policemen who were also killed within their line of duty.
He scored the constitutional body for not doing its job well.
“Parang they are not doing their function well, namimili sila ng i-imbestigahan nila. Dapat lahat iimbestigahan nila kung [may] violation ng human rights,” he said. With PNA