MANILA, Philippines — Sen. Imee Marcos said the Philippines should sever ties with Iceland for spearheading a UN resolution compelling an international review of killings under the Duterte administration’s lethal drug war.
The daughter of late dictator Ferdinand Marcos — whose presidency was tainted by widespread human rights abuses and massive corruption — said cutting diplomatic relations with Iceland would “send a strong statement that other countries should not impose their values on us.”
Related Stories
“We are an independent country enforcing its own drug laws to eradicate its own war against the pernicious drug trade,” the senator said in a statement picked up by state-run PTV News.
“How can these countries point a finger at the Philippines when many of them have legalized abortion and have ignored the right to life of unborn children?” she added.
Voting 18-14 with 15 abstentions, the UN human rights council narrowly approved Thursday a two-page resolution tabled by Iceland.
The text, however, is not seeking an inquiry into the human rights situation in the country but a report—in what activists have described as “a compromise” made to win a majority.
READ: Not a criminal probe: UN 'drug war' reso only seeks rights review
Human rights organizations hailed the adoption of the resolution, which they said is crucial for holding the Philippine government accountable for drug war killings.
Police say 6,600 who resisted arrest have been killed since President Rodrigo Duterte launched his deadly narcotics crackdown — a far cry from rights groups’ estimate that pegs drug-related fatalities at 27,000.
Commenting on the UN vote, Duterte — a political ally of the Marcos family — mocked Iceland, saying in a speech Friday that the “ice-eating” Nordic nation does not understand the Philippines’ drug problem.
Separately, Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. said the resolution does not represent the will of the council, “much less that of the developing countries who are always the target of such resolutions.”
"The Philippines rejects this resolution," Locsin said, adding a warning that there will be “consequences, far-reaching ones.”
"We will not accept a politically partisan and one-sided resolution, so detached from the truth on the ground,” he continued.
Marcos won in the 2019 midterm elections despite controversies surrounding her scholastic records, continuing the disgraced family's political comeback despite the death of the patriarch while in exile in Hawaii in 1989.