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| Senator Leila de Lima / photo from Inquirer |
Detained opposition Senator Leila de Lima on Monday joined
the call from human rights experts in urging the UN Human Rights Council
(UNHRC) to conduct investigation about the extrajudicial killings as well as
other human rights violations under President Rodrigo Duterte.
De Lima, a known fierce critic of the President said she is
one with the human rights community in calling for an independent investigation
into the human rights abuses done under the Philippine government’s all-out war
on drugs.
She also lamented how Duterte allegedly refused to address
reports of such violations and abuse of police forces.
“Amid persistent calls by human rights watchdogs and
international organizations to finally put an end to the killings and abuses in
the country, the murders pursuant to Mr. Duterte’s war on drugs continue, with
only a few cases investigated, prosecuted, and handed out convictions,” De lima
said.
“I fully concur with the 11 UN experts that the United
National Human Rights Council must take concrete actions to address the human
rights crisis in the Philippines by setting up and dispatching urgently an
independent investigation into the unlawful and unresolved killings in the
country,” she added.
“Thousands of Filipino lives were unjustly taken, and the
President and his allies remain unperturbed. Worse, they always readily dismiss
efforts by international forces to solve and put an end into the extrajudicial
killings in the country as another political interference, if not
destabilization plot,” the senator pointed out.
Last September 5, 2018, De Lima reportedly sent a formal
communication to the UNHRC to request for the creation of an international
independent fact-finding mission as an urgent move in what she called as the
human rights crisis in the Philippines.
She highlighted the need of “international solidarity” in
order to protect humanity.
“Even just on the aspect of extrajudicial killings in the
so-called drug war, which has already claimed the lives of more than 20,000
mostly poor Filipinos, no prompt, genuine, thorough, and effective criminal
investigation has ever been launched by the authorities in the Philippines, she
said in her letter.
“I fully concur with the observation of many leaders in
Philippine civil society and international human rights groups that the UN
Human Rights Council must take concrete and sustainable forms of action such as
the setting up of an independent international investigation,” she added.
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