MANILA, Philippines — The chief of the Philippine National Police maintained that domestic remedies are working in the country for those who seek investigation on the government’s campaign against illegal narcotics as he pointed to drug war-linked conviction from back in 2018.
This came in response to an International Criminal Court Registry report stated that 94% of the families and friends of drug war victims want the ICC to look into the Duterte administration's crimes against humanity in the conduct of its so-called war on drugs.
Related Stories
“It is the right of each of us to present our grievance where we think it will be addressed. So we respect the decision of the families of persons killed in anti-illegal drug operations in seeking an International Criminal Court investigation,” said Eleazar.
“But we can assure them that the Philippine justice system works. Proof of this is the conviction of the policemen for the killing of Kian delos Santos and several other court decisions which have caused the dismissal and imprisonment of other PNP personnel."
The sentencing in question, however, was back in 2018.
PNP leadership has often pointed to that one conviction as proof of a justice system functioning for the families of victims. However, the same families continue to report intimidation and coercion by local police urging them not to file formal complaints, according to a global investigative panel.
Progress in other cases, too, has been slow to nonexistent. Even the Commission on Human Rights has said that investigations of thousands of other drug war cases in question are still pending, with only a handful of cases actually reaching the courts.
READ: Abuse in 'drug war' routinely covered up, advocates say
Rights groups said that the ICC report, which found that “victims overwhelmingly support an investigation by the ICC prosecutor into all crimes against humanity allegedly committed in the context of the so called [‘war on drugs’] in the Philippines," was proof of "the lack of credibility of the Philippine system to provide justice to more than thirty thousand cases of extrajudicial killings in the country."
But the PNP chief in his statement Tuesday said killings amid the drug war are already being investigated by the Department of Justice and that the police are cooperating in local investigations as they turned over some pertinent drug war documents to the DOJ.
He left out that only 53 records are being submitted to the justice department, which said that the matter is still being "discussed internally."
“We already made several initiatives to prove that the PNP has no policy of allowing and tolerating all forms of human rights abuses in the conduct of our operations,” said Eleazar.
He said among them are the strengthening of transparency and accountability that include procurement of body-worn cameras and aggressive internal cleansing that includes speeding up the resolution of administrative cases against erring PNP personnel.
By the PNP's own count, deaths that resulted from official anti-drug operations stood at 6,181 by end-July, but rights watchdogs both here and abroad have said the toll including could actually be as high as 30,000.
Former ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda had asked the international body to formally investigate the killings being linked to the drug war, but President Rodrigo Duterte himself has vowed not to cooperate with any investigators should a formal probe materialize.
— with reports from Kristine Joy Patag