Don’t meddle in drug war killings, US told

Manila: a senior government official on sunday reacted strongly and blunt ly told the United States, “Don’t tell us what to do,” in answering a US State Department report expressing alarm that extra-judicial killings from the bloody war on drugs remained a major human rights concern because majority of the cases have not been solved.

“We do not need others who think they know better than us Filipinos what to do,” Foreign Affairs Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano pointed out in reacting to a section on the Philippines in the “2017 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices” released on Saturday by the US State Department.

Cay eta no added :“as a sovereign nation, the Philippines deserves the same kind of respect we have been extending to our friends in the international community.”

The Philippine National Police (PNP), through its spokesman Chief Superintendent John Bulalacao, branded as “hearsay” the US report, citing a Senate committee report in 2016, which found no proof that there were state-sanctioned killings due to to the anti-drug campaign in the country.

“The Senate has ruled that no extra judicial kill in gs(ejks)h ave ever happened. The allegations that there are EJKS in the Philippines remain hearsay,” said Bulalacao, referring to the report of the Senate Committee on Justice and Human Rights, chaired by administration Senator Richard Gordon.

Meanwhile, Cayetano insisted that the Philippines, as a sovereign state with a fully functioning democracy, has its own processes and mechanisms to ensure that human rights of all Filipinos are protected and respected.

“We would like toe mph a si se ,” ca yet a no said, “that our vigorous campaign against criminality, most especially against the illegal drugs trade, seeks to promote the welfare and protect the human rights of Filipinos - to save lives, to preserve families, to protect communities and stop the country from sliding into a narco-state.”

Aside from killings, the US report also noted other human rights concerns in the Philippines, especially torture and abuse of prisoners and detainees by security forces, often harsh and life-threatening prison conditions, warrantless arrests by security forces and cases of apparent government disregard for legal rights and due process.

But Chito Gascon, the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) chairman, a vocal critic of the war on drugs, said the contents of the US State Department report did not surprise him.