De Lima: Duterte must be jailed for drug killings

Former Sen. Leila de Lima and former President Rodrigo Duterte —Grig C. Montegrande; Malacañang file photo

MANILA, Philippines — Former Sen. Leila de Lima maintained on Monday that former President Rodrigo Duterte should be imprisoned for his crimes against humanity as the “instigator and inducer” of killings during his antidrug campaign.

Appearing as a resource person before the House human rights panel, which is looking into extrajudicial killings (EJKs) that happened during Duterte’s drug war, De Lima said she was inclined to believe it might be better to wait for the findings of the International Criminal Court’s office of the prosecutor (ICC-OTP) on the possible culpability of the former chief executive and his men, including then national police chief and now Sen. Ronald dela Rosa.

Mere offshoot

“These killings constitute a systematic attack on civilians and [are] considered as a crime against humanity under International Humanitarian Law,” she said. “For [Duterte’s] crimes against humanity, both as Davao City mayor and Philippine President, [he] should be prosecuted and convicted by the ICC and spend the remainder of his life in prison.”

She pointed out that any investigation of the drug war “necessarily has to go back to the origins and history of the Davao Death Squad (DDS) from its inception in 1998 up to 2016.”

“This is because the 2016 to 2022 drug war is a mere offshoot of the DDS experience in Davao,” she said, alleging that systematic EJKs in Davao City from 1998 to 2016 were “simply replicated at the national level when Duterte assumed the presidency.”

DDS model

Before she became a senator, De Lima investigated killings allegedly perpetrated by the DDS in Davao City as head of the Commission on Human Rights. As senator, she launched an investigation of EJKs, resulting in the filing of drug charges against her for supposedly incurring Duterte’s ire. She was eventually cleared of all charges after being imprisoned for six years.

“The centerpiece of the national drug war was modeled after the DDS system of operations involving active [Philippine National Police] personnel in vigilante killings,” she said.

According to her, policemen from Davao were reassigned to Metro Manila and other urban hubs to organize “local DDS chapters in every city for purposes of carrying out the systematic identification of targets and their summary execution either in ‘nanlaban (resisting) ops’ or by riding tandem vigilantes.”

De Lima lamented that compared to the ICC investigation of the drug war killings, the Department of Justice has “barely scratched the surface,” pointing out that the agency has investigated only 52 out of the thousands of EJK cases.