MANILA, Philippines — Human rights groups and advocates gave a failing grade to the recent presentation by the government at the Universal Periodic Review of its rights record in Geneva.
“Despite attempts by the Philippine delegation to justify the Duterte administration’s war on drugs and to present a positive picture of its achievements on the political, economic, social and cultural rights of the people, most of the attending states still raised serious concerns on a host of human rights issues that remain unaddressed,” National Union of Peoples Lawyers secretary general Ephraim Cortez, who was co-head of the Philippine UPR Watch delegation to Geneva, said in a statement.
The Philippine presentation was made by Senator Alan Peter Cayetano, who has since been named Foreign Affairs secretary, who dismissed reports on the thousands of killings in the course of the Duterte administration’s war on drugs as “alternative facts.”
Cortez noted the more than 250 recommendations “on a host of human rights issues” made by 95 states who participated in the review, mostly on the drug war killings.
Among the countries that made recommendations was long-time Philippine ally the United States, which called on the government to “ensure that all counter-narcotics operations are conducted in conformity with constitutional protections and international human rights obligations.”
Others urged the Philippines to scrap plans to restore the death penalty and to allow UN experts to investigate extrajudicial killings without preconditions.
Still others such as “the Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg and Slovakia called for the implementation of a policy against the use of torture and safeguards against enforced disappearances, and arrests of perpetrators of rights abuses,” Cortez said.
“States such as Estonia, Latvia and Hungary called for investigations of threats and attacks against journalists and human rights defenders,” he added.
But while welcoming the recommendations, he said the Philippine UPR Watch was at the same time “gravely concerned that these recommendations still came up during the third cycle, despite having been noted in the previous two cycles of the UPR in 2008 and 2012.”
“This is evidence not only of the lack of serious effort on the part of the Philippine government to address these observations, but also of the ineffectiveness of its Philippine Human Rights Plan which did not at all help in curbing these violations,” he said.
The group, which includes the human rights group Karapatan, also took the Duterte administration to task “for the continued climate of impunity despite previous recommendations for it to investigate cases of human rights violations and to prosecute the perpetrators.”
Cortez said they intend to submit a report with recommendations on the human rights situation to the peace negotiating panels of the government and National Democratic Front of the Philippines.
Click and watch the video report from Michelle Orosa-Ople:
