JAIL TIME Former President Rodrigo Duterte’s recent testimony at the Senate justifying his war on drugs—and admitting he had employed a “death squad” for it—reignited calls for his prosecution and imprisonment, like here at a press conference held by the human rights groups Karapatan and Selda in Quezon City on Wednesday. —Niño Jesus Orbeta
MANILA, Philippines — Former Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV said on Wednesday that he had sent copies of the transcripts of the Senate and House hearings on President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war to the International Criminal Court (ICC) as additional evidence in the charges of crimes against humanity against the ex-president.
During Monday’s Senate hearing, Duterte confessed that he had a death squad, which he ordered to kill suspected drug offenders when he was the mayor of Davao City for over two decades.
Trillanes was one of the parties that had brought a complaint against Duterte to the Hague-based tribunal over the ruthless antinarcotics campaign that resulted in thousands of deaths, officially numbering over 6,200, which human rights groups say could be multiple times more.
READ: Duterte tells Senate: I have a death squad
The staunch Duterte critic said he submitted the Senate transcripts on Wednesday and those from the House quad committee last week.
“All of these would be used for the trial later on,” Trillanes said in a post on X.
READ: Duterte: My PNP chiefs were ‘death squads’ heads
The ICC had already acknowledged that it had received these transcripts, he told the Inquirer.
Human rights lawyers representing the families of drug war victims had earlier expressed their intention to also hand over documents, including the so-called “narcolist,” presented by resource persons during the quad committee hearings to further pin down Duterte’s accountability in the drug war.
The Duterte narcolist included the names of local government officials with alleged links to the drug trade. But the document appeared to have not been properly vetted.
“If they find that it is not a credible list, then Duterte is part of a conspiracy to commit abuses, including extrajudicial killings,” lawyer Neri Colmenares earlier told the Inquirer.
Colmenares, chair of Bayan Muna partylist, on Wednesday said that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if the ICC terminated its investigation and issued a warrant of arrest against the former president before the end of the year.
He said that Duterte’s admission that he urged policemen to provoke the victims of extrajudicial killings to fight back rendered the argument of self-defense useless, making him a coconspirator of each police officer.
Duterte’s claim that he would “take full responsibility” for the drug war killings was “just drama” since police officers cannot blame the former president for the killings because “unlawful orders are not a defense,” according to Colmenares
“All Duterte did was use himself as a coconspirator in the individual cases of policemen because he said that he would take full responsibility,” he said.
The Commission on Human Rights (CHR) on Wednesday said that it would make police officers and individuals who were involved in extrajudicial killings accountable for their actions during Duterte’s war on drugs.
In a statement, the CHR condemned and expressed “deep concern” over Duterte’s confession during Monday’s Senate hearing that he would “rather have suspected drug dealers killed” by encouraging law enforcers to provoke suspects into fighting back to justify “neutralizing” them in self-defense.
Duterte also said it would be better to spend money on those without food or jobs than waste funds to feed people in jails.
“As more details emerge from the recent Senate Blue Ribbon sub-committee proceedings, the Commission on Human Rights hopes that these efforts will ultimately bring accountability to the perpetrators and all those involved in extrajudicial killings (EJK) during the previous administration’s anti-illegal drug campaign,” CHR said.
It said that it was optimistic that the statements given during the hearings called by the Senate and the House quad committee “will help bring full justice to all” victims of EJK.
“Additionally, the Commission, under the 6th Commission en banc, endeavors to determine the accountable officers and individuals, in pursuit of truth and justice, as more come forward to shed light on events surrounding the campaign on illegal drugs,” it said.
The admissions made under oath by Duterte during the Senate hearing, including having a “death squad,” could be used against him, said Sen. Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, who initiated the bloody antinarcotics campaign as the first national police chief of the previous administration.
Duterte gave various accounts of who comprised his death squad.
At one point during the Senate hearing, he pointed to Dela Rosa and other retired police officers who had served as chiefs of the Davao City police. Later he said there were seven members composed of gangsters. Then he said the hitmen were rich individuals from Davao who just wanted to kill criminals “because they wanted businesses to thrive” in the city.
Duterte later retracted his statement implicating senior officers of the Philippine National Police, particularly graduates of the Philippine Military Academy.
For Sen. Risa Hontiveros, Duterte’s “bombshell” testimony already proves the existence of a so-called Davao Death Squad, and several former officers are implicated in the EJKs.
“He, himself, said that he has a death squad. The war on drugs and extrajudicial killings started with the Davao model, which we are now investigating if it was used as a template to scale up (the operations) nationwide,” the senator said during the hearing.
In his online press briefing on Wednesday, Dela Rosa dismissed the ex-president’s admission of the existence of a death squad as “superlatives to scare off criminals.”
But he maintained that Duterte’s statement that he and several other former Davao police chiefs were death squad commanders was a “100 percent joke.”
Senate Minority Leader Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel III, who chaired Monday’s Senate hearing, said he saw no need to call back Duterte to another hearing when he was asked by reporters on Wednesday how the committee would clarify whether or not the former president was serious or merely joking when he made his admissions.
“The admissions were made and then we would ask that it be taken back?” he said. “We have a lot of material to work with. Let the material stay. Let the criminal law experts study very well the material with the committee.”
The CHR said that the justification for the killings that were encouraged by Duterte violated the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which upholds the right to life and to legal protection.
This also violates the Bill of Rights in the Philippine Constitution, which safeguards a person’s right to life and liberty, and to a presumption of innocence until proven otherwise in a fair trial.