President Rodrigo Duterte has denied ordering the arrest of “istambay” (the plural form of Filipino nouns is not formed with an “s”) despite the Philippine National Police’s detention of over 7,000 mostly young people, and the death, most likely through a police beating, of at least one individual who had stepped shirtless out of his home to get a cellphone “load” only to be arrested and jailed.
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The wanton killings by the police and their surrogate assassins that are the main, in fact the only, component of the brutal and misdirected “war” on drugs that’s targeting the poor while the drug lords are treated with kid gloves and evade prosecution began almost as soon as Rodrigo Duterte assumed the Presidency last year.
Since the collapse of the Marcos terror regime in 1986, only two post-EDSA presidents have dared invoke the martial law provisions of the 1987 Constitution and to awaken justifiable fears of a return to the abuses and violence of fascist rule.
The Philippine delegation to the third cycle of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) co-chaired by Senator Alan Peter Cayetano and deputy executive secretary for legal affairs Menardo Guevarra has a credibility problem. Its name is Rodrigo Duterte.
The Philippine National Police (PNP) says that “only” 1, 398 individuals have been killed in the course of the Rodrigo Duterte regime’s “war” on the illegal drug trade out of a total of 6,011 killings in the country from July 1, 2016 when Mr. Duterte began his watch as President, until March 24, 2017, or a little more than eight months into his six-year term.