Phl gov’t should stop playing the victim — Human Rights Watch

MANILA — Human Rights Watch called on the Philippine government to stop playing the victim following the statement of Foreign Affairs Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano that drug war critics have “politicized” and “weaponized” human rights.

“The truth is, the Philippine government needs to answer for more than 12,000 lives lost without due process in this brutal campaign across the country. The government should stop depicting itself as the victim,” HRW Asia Division researcher Carlos Conde said in a statement Wednesday.

Conde said that Cayetano’s pronouncement is “totally without basis and serves only to frustrate the calls by many for accountability for the Duterte administration’s atrocities related to the socalled war on drugs.”

He also urged the government to heed Iceland’s renewed call to cooperate with a mission of United Nations experts.

“The UN Human Rights Council should take all necessary measures to help end to extrajudicial killings in the Philippines’ “drug war” and bring those responsible to justice, including establishing an independent international body to investigate these abuses, which may amount to crimes against humanity,” Conde said.

Speaking before the 37th UNHRC in Geneva, Cayetano said that President Rodrigo Duterte’s brutal drug war was meant to “save lives, to preserve families, to protect communities and stop the country from sliding into a narco-state” amid the mounting death toll in the crackdown.

In the same speech before the UNHRC on Tuesday, Cayetano, without making direct references to the UN rapporteur on summary executions Agnes Callamard, reiterated that the government would allow any probers to look into alleged summary executions in the drug war, except her.

Callamard has earned the ire of the administration over her criticisms of the drug war.