Secret jail shows ‘bottomless pit of impunity’ under Duterte—De Lima

A secret room where detainees are held at Manila Police Station 1 in Tondo. RAFFY LERMA/INQUIRER

The discovery of a “secret cell” in a Manila police station “only mirrors the complete breakdown of the rule of law in the country,” Senator Leila de Lima said in a statement on Friday.

“If you can kill 8,000 human beings (and counting), what prevents you from illegally detaining incommunicado victims of Tokhang shakedowns? De Lima said in a statement.

“Once we allowed a mass murderer to take the helm of government and carry out a criminal policy of extrajudicial killings, there is pretty much nothing else that cannot be done with impunity under his regime,” she said, reacting to the discovery of a dozen of drug suspects detained at a secret cell behind a shelf in a police station in Tondo, Manila.

READ: Drug suspects found in secret police cell

As former chair of the Senate committee on justice and human rights, the neophyte senator had initiated an investigation on alleged extrajudicial killings in the country under the Duterte administration.

The probe had cost her the chairmanship of the committee as she was ousted and replaced by Senator Richard Gordon, a member of the Senate majority bloc. The committee later came out with a report that there was no proof that the killings were state-sponsored.

De Lima, who was Justice Secretary during the past administration, pointed out that the rule of law protects the people from being reduced to and treated as “sub-humans.”

But she said, “Once we let government discard that, there is nothing that we can hold up to against the tyranny and oppression, not even the bill of rights, which the President now only uses for toilet paper. Because we let him kill our poor countrymen like animals, we can only expect more animal and inhuman treatment from his policemen,.”

“And as long as they are at this, they also might as well profit from the destruction of the rule of law—from tokhang-for-ransom, to the police vigilantes’ pay-per-kill system, to the incommunicado detention of shakedown victims. This is us spiraling down the bottomless pit of impunity and lawlessness, with the former law enforcers turned enforcers of lawlessness profiting from it,” said the senator.

Some of the drug suspects found in the hidden cell claimed that the police were asking them to pay for their release.

“This is a call for our people to wake up and see the bitter truth: change has come, but not the kind we were promised or were hoping for,” De Lima added.

In an ambush interview with reporters at the Malacañang, President Rodrigo Duterte said he will order an investigation on the secret cell. IDL

READ: Duterte vows to investigate Manila secret cell