More EJKs feared over PNP’s Alsa Masa-like network

The plan of the Philippine National Police (PNP) to establish a civilian network similar to the Alsa Masa group in Davao City for grassroots intelligence gathering “will worsen the human rights calamity” in the country, an international human rights group said Monday.

The Human Rights Watch (HRW) said that using a network like Alsa Masa to gather more intelligence for the Duterte administration’s war against illegal drugs will only result in more extrajudicial killings.

“Tapping this network to gather more intelligence – often nothing more than gossip and raw, unverified information – for use in the murderous campaign by the Duterte administration against suspected drug users and suspected criminals will only mean more extrajudicial deaths,” HRW said in a statement.

“This intelligence network, for all practical purposes, usurps the function of the courts to determine the culpability of a person accused of a crime and, worse, give the police justification to harm or kill suspects without due process of law,” it added.

The international human rights group said that the members of the PNP, who they said were behind the supposed thousands of extrajudicial killings related to the drug war, should be held accountable to the deaths and not given another weapon to violate human rights.

IN THE KNOW: Alsa Masa

“Instead of being given another weapon to violate the rights of citizens, the police should be held accountable for these thousands and thousands of death,” the HRW said.

The PNP earlier had revealed a plan to expand the Community Mobilization Project (CMP), an intelligence-gathering system launched in Calabarzon (Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal, Quezon) last year, which is like “the Alsa Masa.”

READ: PNP mulls over Alsa Masa-like network 

The Alsa Masa was a vigilante group that the government hailed as instrumental in weakening the communist New People’s Army (NPA) in Southern Mindanao in the 1980s./ac