Prosecutors dared to end impunity in unexplained killings

SUBIC BAY FREEPORT – Human Rights Commissioner Leila De Lima challenged prosecutors and lawyers yesterday to help combat criminal impunity highlighted by the spate of unsolved killings and which has become “a cancer in our national soul.”

“Decide what cases need to be highlighted so that we as a people can develop our own institutional memory and thus have a national sense of right and wrong,” De Lima said in a speech before lawyers, human rights workers and journalists at the International Training on the Investigation and Prosecution of EJK or extra-judicial killings at the Vista Marina Hotel here.

“Day in day out, you are all in the trenches trying in your own way to make the system work and make a difference in the process,” she said.

De Lima stressed that cases of EJK, enforced disappearance and torture are not simple cases of murder, kidnapping, assault or physical injury, but are reflections of a social malaise that will eventually cause the breakdown of a civilized society.

“These cases are crimes committed not only to a person or his family or his organization, but are crimes that are committed against our national soul,” she said.

De Lima said that EJK, enforced disappearance and torture should have been relegated to the so-called dustbin of history after the ouster of the dictator Marcos.

She said that from 2001 to the present, there were 475 cases of alleged EJK and political killings involving 622 victims, but “as of the moment, there have been exactly zero convictions.”

For his part chief state prosecutor Jovencito Zuño said the government has formed a special task force on EJK composed of prosecutors.

However, the lack or absence of witnesses has stalled the task force’s work.

He stressed that extra-judicial killing is not a government policy.