Yearender: Day of reckoning dawns for Duterte drug war

QUAD COMM / NOVEMBER 13, 2024 Former President Rodrigo Roa Duterte attends the House of Representatives Committees on Dangerous Drugs, Public Order & Safety, Human Rights and Public Accounts Joint Committee Meeting on Wednesday, November 13, 2024 at People’s Center Building, House of Representatives, Quezon City. Seated right is former Sen. Leila De Lima. —File p photo by NIÑO JESUS ORBETA | Philippine Daily Inquirer

MANILA, Philippines — Former President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs, which once enjoyed wide support from Congress where his “supermajority” allies either tacitly approved or openly praised it—saw a stark reversal in the year that was.

On Dec. 18, the House quad committee declared that Duterte, along with his allies, Senators Christopher “Bong” Go and Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, should be held accountable for crimes against humanity under Republic Act (RA) No. 9851 for leading the brutal campaign that claimed thousands of Filipino lives over six years.

READ: Unraveling Duterte’s drug war

In recommending charges against the former president, the mega panel chaired by Surigao del Norte Rep. Robert Ace Barbers asserted that, for the victims of extrajudicial killings, the drug war constituted “a profound and systematic violation of their inherent rights to life and dignity.”

Before this, government officials, including President Marcos, have at least admitted that there have been abuses in the government’s anti-drug campaign.

The quad committee report—adopted by the lower chamber during its last plenary session before Christmas—is the first time that a government report formally acknowledged the “systematic” nature of these violations, a distinction not lost on human rights advocates.

Carlos Conde, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, said this was part of the House’s strategy to “lay the predicate” for the hearings, otherwise the Marcos administration, through Speaker Martin Romualdez, “will have a hard time justifying why they are or how they are conducting the hearing.”

Romualdez himself has called the quad committee a sort of “truth commission” for the abuses committed in the drug war.

“But you have to keep in mind that the hearing is not a judicial process, not an accountability process… It’s a political move,” said Conde.

Kristina Conti, lawyer for the drug war victims, echoed this sentiment: “Of the running total number of [hearing] hours, victims have only been heard for less than 30 minutes. [Their] time to tell their stories and to confront perpetrators have not been adequate. It cannot and has not fully enforced the ‘right to truth’ and the corresponding entitlement to reconciliation, justice, memory, reparation.”

Nevertheless, she said, highlighting the systematic nature of these kinds of killings “also exposes a lot about our politics, especially about political dynasties and private armed groups, and our culture—dehumanization, victim-mentality and blame-seeking.”

Marathon hearings

The 51-page report provided an exhaustive view of the quad committee’s four-month marathon hearings into the interconnections between extrajudicial killings, illegal offshore gaming operations, and the illegal drug trade.

Its most scathing parts were reserved for their findings in relation to the extrajudicial killings in the drug war. Specifically, it said that Duterte “incited the perpetration of extrajudicial killings and emboldened the impunity of state authorities, by actively encouraging, facilitating, and directly participating in the system that orchestrated the killings and the targeting of suspected drug users and dealers.”

It seeks to drive home why crimes against humanity — either under Article 7 of the Rome Statute or Section 6 of RA 9851 — was the proper charge against Duterte. Both stress that crimes against humanity can only be qualified as such if it is part of a “widespread or systematic attack directed against the civilian population.”

Rights groups have long argued that Duterte, along with his closest aides Go and Dela Rosa, were the most responsible for all the abuses in the drug war.

“The deaths were not simply separate acts of murder by ‘rogue’ policemen. All these were committed under prevailing instructions from the executive, official and unofficial rewards systems, culture and practice among the police, and massive support to death squads,” Conti explained.

Serious test

Should the progress report recommendations eventually lead to prosecutions, it would be the first serious test to RA 9851 as no state official has ever been indicted under this law. The first and only known conviction under this law that punishes crimes against humanity is that of Junaid Awal, a member of the Islamic State-linked Maute Group, by the Taguig Regional Trial Court (RTC) in 2019.

Retired Naga RTC judge and international humanitarian lawyer Soliman Santos Jr. said that while the “ball for case buildup is now with the DOJ (Department of Justice), it can [and should] also be with the [human rights] lawyers and advocates supporting the family-complainants of the Duterte drug war victims in the ICC (International Criminal Court), in confidence-building collaboration with the DOJ.”

How would a local case, however, affect the ongoing ICC investigation, which was allowed to continue precisely because the Philippines has shown unwillingness to investigate the same crimes?

Human rights lawyer and former lawmaker Neri Colmenares does not see a problem. “This should in no way conflict with or substitute for the ICC investigation. Both processes can and should proceed simultaneously to ensure comprehensive justice for the victims and their families,” he said.