SENATOR Leila de Lima’s statement last week sought to frame her arrest on drug charges as a case of political persecution and portray her as a courageous defender of human rights and democracy.
There may be human rights organizations outside the country that will unquestioningly swallow Senator De Lima’s line, but those of us who are familiar with her track record here tend to be far less gullible.
Without commenting on her guilt or innocence on the charge that she benefited from the illegal drug trade in the New Bilibid Prison when she was still Justice secretary, we can still conclude that the senator’s lengthy statement was far from honest.
For example, the senator seeks to cast doubt on the charges against her because the government is using convicted drug lords as state witnesses against her. She describes this as a “revolting plan” that follows a “badly written script.”
Not too long ago, however, Senator De Lima herself tried to use a self-confessed assassin and serial killer to accuse President Rodrigo Duterte of heading the Davao Death Squad when he was still mayor. Was the assassin’s testimony any less credible than those of convicted drug dealers? If we are to dismiss the testimony of witnesses simply because they are criminals as De Lima suggests, shouldn’t we do the same with the accounts provide by her star witness against Duterte?
Yet, her statement is full of ad hominem attacks on the President, based on the testimony of her serial killer witness and a former policeman who reversed his own testimony to the Senate last year, when he said the DDS did not exist.
Then De Lima talks up her record as a human rights defender, citing her time as the chairman of the Human Rights Commission and her six years as Justice secretary in the Aquino administration.
“I can look everyone straight in the eye and say: My track record as a public servant has never been tarnished by any wrongdoing, except until now based on manufactured lies,” she said. “I have never used and will never use my position for my personal interest.”
Indeed, De Lima was the chairman of the Commission on Human Rights for two years under the Arroyo administration, from May 2008 to June 2010, then was Justice secretary for almost six more years from 2010 to 2015—until she ran for the Senate.
In all these eight years, however, when she had the full support of the state machinery, De Lima never successfully prosecuted the case against then mayor Duterte. Instead, she did the bidding of her boss, then President Benigno Aquino III, to go after his political enemies, including the incumbent chief justice of the Supreme Court at the time, and former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. De Lima was so eager to do her master’s bidding, in fact, that she defied a Supreme Court order and prevented Arroyo from leaving the country for medical treatment. Later, still as Justice secretary, De Lima she deprived Mrs. Arroyo of her liberty for more than four years—then failed miserably in her attempt to convict her of plunder. In this time, the UN Commission on Human Rights declared that the Aquino administration had violated international human rights laws by keeping Mrs. Arroyo under detention without the opportunity to post bail, as her other co-accused had already done.
At no point during this time did Justice Secretary De Lima, the avowed defender of human rights, lift a finger to correct the injustice visited upon the former president.
It is the height of hypocrisy now for De Lima to present herself as a defender of human rights, when she did so much to abuse those rights when she was in power.
Senator De Lima is no political prisoner, as she would have us believe. She is just a prisoner with a spotty past. She is no worthy champion of democracy, regardless of what she claims. She has been weighed in the balances and found wanting.