Duterte just frustrated, Palace says of threats

Malacañang on Wednesday dismissed as an “expression of frustration” President Duterte’s threat to kill human rights activists critical of his war on drugs.

But Sen. Leila de Lima blasted “the great evil that now pervades in this country” and a group of human rights activists denounced the President’s remark “in the strongest term possible.”

Deputy presidential spokesperson Kris Ablan said Mr. Duterte did not intend to threaten individuals criticizing his take-no-prisoner campaign against illegal drugs that had left 5,000 people dead, half of the number in police operations.

“I think his statement last Monday was just another expression of his frustration on the difficulty of running the country,” Ablan told a press briefing.

“We appeal that citizens decide on the President’s actions more than his talk,” he said. “Although he may have said that … there is no censorship at all [on the] media, the human rights groups or on any of those who protest against the government.”

Ablan stressed that the Duterte administration respected the people’s constitutional right to free speech and the right to assembly.

An archcritic of Mr. Duterte and object of his scorn for allegedly protecting drug lords when she was justice secretary and allowing felons to turn the national penitentiary into a nerve center of a multibillion-peso narcotics business, De Lima said the people should not take the President’s remarks as “mere jokes.”

She said in a statement that Mr. Duterte “must not be allowed to kill human rights activists and absolve himself by pulling out of the ICC (International Criminal Court).”

“His impunity, both in words and actions, must be put to a stop and end soon. There is no other way to do this but to continue to fight for what is right, and to defeat the great evil that now pervades in this country,” De Lima said.

The Network Against Killings in the Philippines said it was “appalled President Duterte would even think of human rights activists as the enemy.”

“We condemn it in the strongest term possible,” the group said.

Edre Olalia, president of the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers, said: “We cannot hallucinate or go berserk in our fixation to quell this pandemic. We have to know who our real enemies are. Let us get a hold of ourselves here.”

On Monday night, the President reiterated the magnitude of the country’s drug problem which, he claimed, had engulfed the country in “narcopolitics.”