opinion about war on drugs in the philippines essay

The human rights consequences of the war on drugs in the Philippines

Subscribe to this week in foreign policy, vanda felbab-brown vanda felbab-brown director - initiative on nonstate armed actors , co-director - africa security initiative , senior fellow - foreign policy , strobe talbott center for security, strategy, and technology.

August 8, 2017

18 min read

On August 2, 2017, Vanda Felbab-Brown submitted a statement for the record for the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the human rights consequences of the war on drugs in the Philippines. Read her full statement below.

I am a Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution. However, as an independent think tank, the Brookings Institution does not take institutional positions on any issue. Therefore, my testimony represents my personal views and does not reflect the views of Brookings, its other scholars, employees, officers, and/or trustees.

President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs in the Philippines is morally and legally unjustifiable. Resulting in egregious and large-scale violations of human rights, it amounts to state-sanctioned murder. It is also counterproductive for countering the threats and harms that the illegal drug trade and use pose to society — exacerbating both problems while profoundly shredding the social fabric and rule of law in the Philippines. The United States and the international community must condemn and sanction the government of the Philippines for its conduct of the war on drugs.

THE SLAUGHTER SO FAR

On September 2, 2016 after a bomb went off in Davao where Duterte had been mayor for 22 years, the Philippine president declared a “state of lawlessness” 1 in the country. That is indeed what he unleashed in the name of fighting crime and drugs since he became the country’s president on June 30, 2016. With his explicit calls for police to kill drug users and dealers 2 and the vigilante purges Duterte ordered of neighborhoods, 3 almost 9000 people accused of drug dealing or drug use were killed in the Philippines in the first year of his government – about one third by police in anti-drug operations. 4 Although portrayed as self-defense shootings, these acknowledged police killings are widely believed to be planned and staged, with security cameras and street lights unplugged, and drugs and guns planted on the victim after the shooting. 5 According to the interviews and an unpublished report an intelligence officer shared with Reuters , the police are paid about 10,000 pesos ($200) for each killing of a drug suspect as well as other accused criminals. The monetary awards for each killing are alleged to rise to 20,000 pesos ($400) for a street pusher, 50,000 pesos ($990) for a member of a neighborhood council, one million pesos ($20,000) for distributors, retailers, and wholesalers, and five million ($100,000) for “drug lords.” Under pressure from higher-up authorities and top officials, local police officers and members of neighborhood councils draw up lists of drug suspects. Lacking any kind transparency, accountability, and vetting, these so-called “watch lists” end up as de facto hit lists. A Reuters investigation revealed that police officers were killing some 97 percent of drug suspects during police raids, 6 an extraordinarily high number and one that many times surpasses accountable police practices. That is hardly surprising, as police officers are not paid any cash rewards for merely arresting suspects. Both police officers and members of neighborhood councils are afraid not to participate in the killing policies, fearing that if they fail to comply they will be put on the kill lists themselves.

Similarly, there is widespread suspicion among human rights groups and monitors, 7 reported in regularly in the international press, that the police back and encourage the other extrajudicial killings — with police officers paying assassins or posing as vigilante groups. 8 A Reuters interview with a retired Filipino police intelligence officer and another active-duty police commander reported both officers describing in granular detail how under instructions from top-level authorities and local commanders, police units mastermind the killings. 9 No systematic investigations and prosecutions of these murders have taken place, with top police officials suggesting that they are killings among drug dealers themselves. 10

Such illegal vigilante justice, with some 1,400 extrajudicial killings, 11 was also the hallmark of Duterte’s tenure as Davao’s mayor, earning him the nickname Duterte Harry. And yet, far from being an exemplar of public safety and crime-free city, Davao remains the murder capital of the Philippines. 12 The current police chief of the Philippine National Police Ronald Dela Rosa and President Duterte’s principal executor of the war on drugs previously served as the police chief in Davao between 2010 and 2016 when Duterte was the town’s mayor.

In addition to the killings, mass incarceration of alleged drug users is also under way in the Philippines. The government claims that more than a million users and street-level dealers have voluntarily “surrendered” to the police. Many do so out of fear of being killed otherwise. However, in interviews with Reuters , a Philippine police commander alleged that the police are given quotas of “surrenders,” filling them by arresting anyone on trivial violations (such as being shirtless or drunk). 13 Once again, the rule of law is fundamentally perverted to serve a deeply misguided and reprehensible state policy.

SMART DESIGN OF DRUG POLICIES VERSUS THE PHILIPPINES REALITY

Smart policies for addressing drug retail markets look very different than the violence and state-sponsored crime President Duterte has thrust upon the Philippines. Rather than state-sanctioned extrajudicial killings and mass incarceration, policing retail markets should have several objectives: The first, and most important, is to make drug retail markets as non-violent as possible. Duterte’s policy does just the opposite: in slaughtering people, it is making a drug-distribution market that was initially rather peaceful (certainly compared to Latin America, 14 such as in Brazil 15 ) very violent – this largely the result of the state actions, extrajudicial killings, and vigilante killings he has ordered. Worse yet, the police and extrajudicial killings hide other murders, as neighbors and neighborhood committees put on the list of drug suspects their rivals and people whose land or property they want to steal; thus, anyone can be killed by anyone and then labeled a pusher.

The unaccountable en masse prosecution of anyone accused of drug trade involvement or drug use also serves as a mechanism to squash political pluralism and eliminate political opposition. Those who dare challenge President Duterte and his reprehensible policies are accused of drug trafficking charges and arrested themselves. The most prominent case is that of Senator Leila de Lima. But it includes many other lower-level politicians. Without disclosing credible evidence or convening a fair trial, President Duterte has ordered the arrest of scores of politicians accused of drug-trade links; three such accused mayors have died during police arrests, often with many other individuals dying in the shoot-outs. The latest such incident occurred on July 30, 2017 when Reynaldo Parojinog, mayor of Ozamiz in the southern Philippines, was killed during a police raid on his house, along with Parojinog’s wife and at least five other people.

Another crucial goal of drug policy should be to enhance public health and limit the spread of diseases linked to drug use. The worst possible policy is to push addicts into the shadows, ostracize them, and increase the chance of overdoses as well as a rapid spread of HIV/AIDS, drug-resistant tuberculosis, and hepatitis. In prisons, users will not get adequate treatment for either their addiction or their communicable disease. That is the reason why other countries that initially adopted similar draconian wars on drugs (such as Thailand in 2001 16 and Vietnam in the same decade 17 ) eventually tried to backpedal from them, despite the initial popularity of such policies with publics in East Asia. Even though throughout East Asia, tough drug policies toward drug use and the illegal drug trade remain government default policies and often receive widespread support, countries, such as Thailand, Vietnam, and even Myanmar have gradually begun to experiment with or are exploring HARM reduction approaches, such as safe needle exchange programs and methadone maintenance, as the ineffective and counterproductive nature and human rights costs of the harsh war on drugs campaign become evident.

Moreover, frightening and stigmatizing drug users and pushing use deeper underground will only exacerbate the spread of infectious diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, and tuberculosis. Even prior to the Duterte’s brutal war on drugs, the rate of HIV infections in the Philippines has been soaring due to inadequate awareness and failure to support safe sex practices, such as access to condoms. Along with Afghanistan, the Philippine HIV infection rate is the highest in Asia, increasing 50 percent between 2010 and 2015. 18 Among high-risk groups, including injection- drug users, gay men, transgender women, and female prostitutes, the rate of new infections jumped by 230 percent between 2011and 2015. Duterte’s war on drugs will only intensify these worrisome trends among drug users.

Further, as Central America has painfully learned in its struggles against street gangs, mass incarceration policies turn prisons into recruiting grounds for organized crime. Given persisting jihadi terrorism in the Philippines, mass imprisonment of low-level dealers and drug traffickers which mix them with terrorists in prisons can result in the establishment of dangerous alliances between terrorists and criminals, as has happened in Indonesia.

The mass killings and imprisonment in the Philippines will not dry up demand for drugs: the many people who will end up in overcrowded prisons and poorly-designed treatment centers (as is already happening) will likely remain addicted to drugs, or become addicts. There is always drug smuggling into prisons and many prisons are major drug distribution and consumption spots.

Even when those who surrendered are placed into so-called treatment centers, instead of outright prisons, large problems remain. Many who surrendered do not necessarily have a drug abuse problem as they surrendered preemptively to avoid being killed if they for whatever reason ended up on the watch list. Those who do have a drug addiction problem mostly do not receive adequate care. Treatment for drug addiction is highly underdeveloped and underprovided in the Philippines, and China’s rushing in to build larger treatment facilities is unlikely to resolve this problem. In China itself, many so-called treatment centers often amounted to de facto prisons or force-labor detention centers, with highly questionable methods of treatment and very high relapse rates.

As long as there is demand, supply and retailing will persist, simply taking another form. Indeed, there is a high chance that Duterte’s hunting down of low-level pushers (and those accused of being pushers) will significantly increase organized crime in the Philippines and intensify corruption. The dealers and traffickers who will remain on the streets will only be those who can either violently oppose law enforcement and vigilante groups or bribe their way to the highest positions of power. By eliminating low-level, mostly non-violent dealers, Duterte is paradoxically and counterproductively setting up a situation where more organized and powerful drug traffickers and distribution will emerge.

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Inducing police to engage in de facto shoot-to-kill policies is enormously corrosive of law enforcement, not to mention the rule of law. There is a high chance that the policy will more than ever institutionalize top-level corruption, as only powerful drug traffickers will be able to bribe their way into upper-levels of the Philippine law enforcement system, and the government will stay in business. Moreover, corrupt top-level cops and government officials tasked with such witch-hunts will have the perfect opportunity to direct law enforcement against their drug business rivals as well as political enemies, and themselves become the top drug capos. Unaccountable police officers officially induced to engage in extrajudicial killings easily succumb to engaging in all kinds of criminality, being uniquely privileged to take over criminal markets. Those who should protect public safety and the rule of law themselves become criminals.

Such corrosion of the law enforcement agencies is well under way in the Philippines as a result of President Duterte’s war on drugs. Corruption and the lack of accountability in the Philippine police l preceded Duterte’s presidency, but have become exacerbated since, with the war on drugs blatant violations of rule of law and basic legal and human rights principles a direct driver. The issue surfaced visibly and in a way that the government of the Philippines could not simply ignore in January 2017 when Philippine drug squad police officers kidnapped a South Korean businessman Jee Ick-joo and extorted his family for money. Jee was ultimately killed inside the police headquarters. President Duterte expressed outrage and for a month suspended the national police from participating in the war on drugs while some police purges took places. Rather than a serious effort to root out corruption, those purges served principally to tighten control over the police. The wrong-headed illegal policies of Duterte’s war on drugs were not examined or corrected. Nor were other accountability and rule of law practices reinforced. Thus when after a month the national police were was asked to resume their role in the war on the drugs, the perverted system slid back into the same human rights violations and other highly detrimental processes and outcomes.

WHAT COUNTERNARCOTICS POLICIES THE PHILIPPINES SHOULD ADOPT

The Philippines should adopt radically different approaches: The shoot-to-kill directives to police and calls for extrajudicial killings should stop immediately, as should dragnets against low-level pushers and users. If such orders are issued, prosecutions of any new extrajudicial killings and investigations of encounter killings must follow. In the short term, the existence of pervasive culpability may prevent the adoption of any policy that would seek to investigate and prosecute police and government officials and members of neighborhood councils who have been involved in the state-sanctioned slaughter. If political leadership in the Philippines changes, however, standing up a truth commission will be paramount. In the meantime, however, all existing arrested drug suspects need to be given fair trials or released.

Law-enforcement and rule of law components of drug policy designs need to make reducing criminal violence and violent militancy among their highest objectives. The Philippines should build up real intelligence on the drug trafficking networks that President Duterte alleges exist in the Philippines and target their middle operational layers, rather than low-level dealers, as well as their corruption networks in the government and law enforcement. However, the latter must not be used to cover up eliminating rival politicians and independent political voices.

To deal with addiction, the Philippines should adopt enlightened harm-reduction measures, including methadone maintenance, safe-needle exchange, and access to effective treatment. No doubt, these are difficult and elusive for methamphetamines, the drug of choice in the Philippines. Meth addiction is very difficult to treat and is associated with high morbidity levels. Instead of turning his country into a lawless Wild East, President Duterte should make the Philippines the center of collaborative East Asian research on how to develop effective public health approaches to methamphetamine addiction.

IMPLICATIONS FOR U.S. POLICY

It is imperative that the United States strongly and unequivocally condemns the war on drugs in the Philippines and deploys sanctions until state-sanctioned extrajudicial killings and other state-authorized rule of law violations are ended. The United States should adopt such a position even if President Duterte again threatens the U.S.-Philippines naval bases agreements meant to provide the Philippines and other countries with protection against China’s aggressive moves in the South China Sea. President Duterte’s pro-China preferences will not be moderated by the United States being cowed into condoning egregious violations of human rights. In fact, a healthy U.S.-Philippine long-term relationship will be undermined by U.S. silence on state-sanctioned murder.

However, the United States must recognize that drug use in the Philippines and East Asia more broadly constitute serious threats to society. Although internationally condemned for the war on drugs, President Duterte remains highly popular in the Philippines, with 80 percent of Filipinos still expressing “much trust” for him after a year of his war on drugs and 9,000 people dead. 19 Unlike in Latin America, throughout East Asia, drug use is highly disapproved of, with little empathy for users and only very weak support for drug policy reform. Throughout the region, as well as in the Philippines, tough-on-drugs approaches, despite their ineffective outcomes and human rights violations, often remain popular. Fostering an honest and complete public discussion about the pros and cons of various drug policy approaches is a necessary element in creating public demand for accountability of drug policy in the Philippines.

Equally important is to develop better public health approaches to dealing with methamphetamine addiction. It is devastating throughout East Asia as well as in the United States, though opiate abuse mortality rates now eclipse methamphetamine drug abuse problems. Meth addiction is very hard to treat and often results in severe morbidity. Yet harm reduction approaches have been predominately geared toward opiate and heroin addictions, with substitution treatments, such as methadone, not easily available for meth and other harm reduction approaches also not directly applicable.

What has been happening in the Philippines is tragic and unconscionable. But if the United States can at least take a leading role in developing harm reduction and effective treatment approaches toward methamphetamine abuse, its condemnation of unjustifiable and reprehensible policies, such as President Duterte’s war on drugs in the Philippines, will far more soundly resonate in East Asia, better stimulating local publics to demand accountability and respect for rule of law from their leaders.

Neil Jerome Morales, “Philippines Blames IS-linked Abu Sayyaf for Bomb in Duterte’s Davao,” Reuters , September 2, 2016, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-philippines-blast-idUSKCN11824W?il=0.
Rishi Iyengar, “The Killing Time: Inside Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s War on Drugs,” Time , August 24, 2016, http://time.com/4462352/rodrigo-duterte-drug-war-drugs-philippines-killing/.
Jim Gomez, “Philippine President-Elect Urges Public to Kill Drug Dealers,” The Associated Press, June 5, 2016, http://bigstory.ap.org/article/58fc2315d488426ca2512fc9fc8d6427/philippine-president-elect-urges-public-kill-drug-dealers.
Manuel Mogato and Clare Baldwin, “Special Report: Police Describe Kill Rewards, Staged Crime Scenes in Duterte’s Drug War,” Reuters , April 18, 2017, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-philippines-duterte-police-specialrep-idUSKBN17K1F4.
Clare Baldwin , Andrew R.C. Marshall and Damir Sagolj , “Police Rack Up an Almost Perfectly Deadly Record in Philippine Drug War,” Reuters , http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/philippines-duterte-police/.
See, for example, Human Rights Watch, “Philippines: Police Deceit in ‘Drug War’ Killings,” March 2, 2017, https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/03/02/philippines-police-deceit-drug-war-killings ; and Amnesty International, “Philippines: The Police’s Murderous War on the Poor,” https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2017/01/philippines-the-police-murderous-war-on-the-poor/.
Reuters , April 18, 2017.
Aurora Almendral, “The General Running Duterte’s Antidrug War,” The New York Times , June 2, 2017.
“A Harvest of Lead,” The Economist , August 13, 2016, http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21704793-rodrigo-duterte-living-up-his-promise-fight-crime-shooting-first-and-asking-questions.
Reuters, April 18, 2017.
Vanda Felbab-Brown and Harold Trinkunas, “UNGASS 2016 in Comparative Perspective: Improving the Prospects for Success,” The Brookings Institution, April 29, 2015, https://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Papers/2015/04/global-drug-policy/FelbabBrown-TrinkunasUNGASS-2016-final-2.pdf?la=en.
See, for example, Paula Miraglia, “Drugs and Drug Trafficking in Brazil: Trends and Policies,” The Brookings Institution, April 29, 2015, https://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Papers/2015/04/global-drug-policy/Miraglia–Brazil-final.pdf?la=en .
James Windle, “Drugs and Drug Policy in Thailand,” Improving Global Drug Policy: Comparative Perspectives and UNGASS 2016, The Brookings Institution, April 2015, https://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Papers/2015/04/global-drug-policy/WindleThailand-final.pdf?la=en .
James Windle, “Drugs and Drug Policy in Vietnam,” Improving Global Drug Policy: Comparative Perspectives and UNGASS 2016, The Brookings Institution, April 2015, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/WindleVietnam-final.pdf.
Aurora Almendral, “As H.I.V. Soars in the Philippines, Conservatives Kill School Condom Plan,” The New York Times , February 28, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/world/asia/as-hiv-soars-in-philippines-conservatives-kill-school-condom-plan.html?_r=0.
Nicole Curato, “In the Philippines, All the President’s People,” The New York Times , May 31, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/opinion/philippines-rodrigo-duterte.html.

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Human Rights and Duterte’s War on Drugs

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs has led to thousands of extrajudicial killings, raising human rights concerns, says expert John Gershman in this interview.

Interview by Michelle Xu , Interviewer John Gershman , Interviewee

December 16, 2016 3:56 pm (EST)

Since becoming president of the Philippines in June 2016, Rodrigo Duterte has launched a war on drugs that has resulted in the extrajudicial deaths of thousands of alleged drug dealers and users across the country. The Philippine president sees drug dealing and addiction as “major obstacles to the Philippines’ economic and social progress,” says John Gershman, an expert on Philippine politics. The drug war is a cornerstone of Duterte’s domestic policy and represents the extension of policies he’d implemented earlier in his political career as the mayor of the city of Davao. In December 2016, the United States withheld poverty aid to the Philippines after declaring concern over Duterte’s war on drugs.

How did the Philippines’ war on drugs start?

When Rodrigo Duterte campaigned for president, he claimed that drug dealing and drug addiction were major obstacles to the Philippines’ economic and social progress. He promised a large-scale crackdown on dealers and addicts, similar to the crackdown that he engaged in when he was mayor of Davao, one of the Philippines’ largest cities on the southern island of Mindanao. When Duterte became president in June, he encouraged the public to “go ahead and kill” drug addicts. His rhetoric has been widely understood as an endorsement of extrajudicial killings, as it has created conditions for people to feel that it’s appropriate to kill drug users and dealers. What have followed seem to be vigilante attacks against alleged or suspected drug dealers and drug addicts. The police are engaged in large-scale sweeps. The Philippine National Police also revealed a list of high-level political officials and other influential people who were allegedly involved in the drug trade.

“When Rodrigo Duterte campaigned for president, he claimed that drug dealing and drug addiction were major obstacles to the Philippines’ economic and social progress.”

Philippines

Rodrigo Duterte

Drug Policy

The dominant drug in the Philippines is a variant of methamphetamine called shabu. According to a 2012 United Nations report , among all the countries in East Asia, the Philippines had the highest rate of methamphetamine abuse. Estimates showed that about 2.2 percent of Filipinos between the ages of sixteen and sixty-four were using methamphetamines, and that methamphetamines and marijuana were the primary drugs of choice. In 2015, the national drug enforcement agency reported that one fifth of the barangays, the smallest administrative division in the Philippines, had evidence of drug use, drug trafficking, or drug manufacturing; in Manila, the capital, 92 percent of the barangays had yielded such evidence.

How would you describe Duterte’s leadership as the mayor of Davao?

After the collapse of the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship, there were high levels of crime in Davao and Duterte cracked down on crime associated with drugs and criminality more generally. There was early criticism of his time as mayor by Philippine and international human rights groups because of his de facto endorsement of extrajudicial killings, under the auspices of the “Davao Death Squad.”

Duterte was also successful at negotiating with the Philippine Communist Party. He was seen broadly as sympathetic to their concerns about poverty, inequality, and housing, and pursued a reasonably robust anti-poverty agenda while he was mayor. He was also interested in public health issues, launching the first legislation against public smoking in the Philippines, which he has claimed he will launch nationally.

What have been the outcomes of the drug war?

By early December , nearly 6,000 people had been killed: about 2,100 have died in police operations and the remainder in what are called “deaths under investigation,” which is shorthand for vigilante killings. There are also claims that half a million to seven hundred thousand people have surrendered themselves to the police. More than 40,000 people have been arrested.

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Although human rights organizations and political leaders have spoken out against the crackdown, Duterte has been relatively successful at not having the legislature engaged in any serious oversight of or investigation into this war. Philippine Senator Leila de Lima, former chairperson of the Philippine Commission on Human Rights and a former secretary of justice under the previous administration, had condemned the war on drugs and held hearings on human rights violations associated with these extrajudicial killings. However, in August, Duterte alleged that he had evidence of de Lima having an affair with her driver, who had been using drugs and collecting drug protection money when de Lima was the justice secretary. De Lima was later removed from her position chairing the investigative committee in a 16-4 vote by elected members of the Senate committee.

What is the public reaction to the drug war?

The war on drugs has received a high level of popular support from across the class spectrum in the Philippines. The most recent nationwide survey on presidential performance and trust ratings conducted from September 25 to October 1 by Pulse Asia Research showed that Duterte’s approval rating was around 86 percent. Even through some people are concerned about these deaths, they support him as a president for his position on other issues. For example, he has a relatively progressive economic agenda, with a focus on economic inequality.

Duterte is also supporting a range of anti-poverty programs and policies. The most recent World Bank quarterly report speaks positively about Duterte’s economic plans. The fact that he wants to work on issues of social inequality and economic inequality makes people not perceive the drug war as a war on the poor.

How is Duterte succeeding in carrying out this war on drugs?

The Philippine judicial system is very slow and perceived as corrupt, enabling Duterte to act proactively and address the issue of drugs in a non-constructive way with widespread violations of human rights. Moreover, in the face of a corrupt, elite-dominated political system and a slow, ineffective, and equally corrupt judicial system, people are willing to tolerate this politician who promised something and is now delivering.

“Drug dealers and drug addicts are a stigmatized group, and stigmatized groups always have difficulty gaining political support for the defense of their rights.”

There are no trials, so there is no evidence that the people being killed are in fact drug dealers or drug addicts. [This situation] shows the weakness of human rights institutions and discourse in the face of a popular and skilled populist leader. It is different from college students being arrested under the Marcos regime or activists being targeted under the first Aquino administration, when popular outcry was aroused. Drug dealers and drug addicts are a stigmatized group, and stigmatized groups always have difficulty gaining political support for the defense of their rights.

How has the United States reacted to the drug war and why is Duterte challenging U.S.-Philippines relations?

It’s never been a genuine partnership. It’s always been a relationship dominated by U.S. interests. Growing up in the 1960s, Duterte lived through a period when the United States firmly supported a regime that was even more brutal than this particular regime and was willing to not criticize that particular government. He noticed that the United States was willing to overlook human rights violations when these violations served their geopolitical interests. He was unhappy about the double standards. [Editor’s Note: The Obama administration has expressed concern over reports of extrajudicial killings and encouraged Manila to abide by its international human rights obligations.] For the first time, the United States is facing someone who is willing to challenge this historically imbalanced relationship. It is unclear what might happen to the relationship under the administration of Donald J. Trump, but initial indications are that it may not focus on human rights in the Philippines. President-Elect Trump has reportedly endorsed the Philippine president’s effort, allegedly saying that the country is going about the drug war "the right way," according to Duterte .

The interview has been edited and condensed.

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War on drugs: Success or failure? Who knows?

When Rodrigo Duterte ran for president in 2016, he focused on three major issues: corruption, crime, and drugs. The question that should be asked, after 57 months into his 72-month term, is: Has he succeeded? Our measure of success will be the government’s own targets as set out in the Philippine Development Plan 2017-2022 (PDP)

If you ask President Duterte himself, or if you listen to his assessment, directly or as reported in the press, he has not succeeded, at least with respect to corruption and drugs.

Looking at the latest Statistical Indicators on Philippine Development (StatDev) compiled by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA)—StatDev “aims to serve as an early warning measure by showing the likelihood of achieving the economic and social development goals set forth in the Philippine Development Plan (PDP), including the midterm updates”—one finds that the likelihood of achieving the targets are “Low,” with respect to corruption, meaning that the government has a less-than-50-percent chance of achieving them.

What are some of the corruption targets? There’s the Control of Corruption Indicator, in which the government sought to increase its percentile ranking in the World Governance Indicators (WGI) from the 42nd percentile in 2015 to the 50th percentile in 2022. What happened? As of 2018, the WGI indicates that instead of improving, we regressed. Our percentile ranking went from 42nd to the 34th percentile. That’s a huge dip.

And there’s the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). The PDP targeted that our percentile rank rise from 43rd to 50th. Instead of improving, we deteriorated to the 37th percentile in 2019.

The PDP also targeted an improvement in our percentile rank in the WGI’s Government Effectiveness Indicator. It was a modest target: from 58th percentile to 60th percentile in six years. Alas, during the Duterte administration, the Philippines deteriorated again: to 55th percentile.

So, the PDP indicators do support President Duterte’s assessment with respect to corruption. Failure.

Are there any indicators in the PDP that would help us determine the government’s performance with respect to drugs and crime? After all, Chapter 18 of the PDP, entitled “Ensuring Security, Public Order and Safety,” is devoted to the topic, where it is emphasized that the administration accords it “high priority,” and that “all forms of criminality and illegal drugs (are to be) significantly reduced.”

Well, Reader, know that of the 647 indicators that are included in the Results Matrices of the PDP, none of them have to do with crimes or drugs. Why in heaven’s name not? Because, I am told, of national security reasons. I kid you not. This means that the PSA, thru StatDev, cannot monitor the effectiveness of the police or drug-related programs. Only the Philippine National Police and the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency can do so, and we must take their word for it.

So while crimes, drugs, and corruption were the battle cry of the Duterte campaign, in the case of crime and drugs, we have no baseline indicators (what it was like). Neither do we have targets to be achieved by 2022. Except maybe in the hearts of the concerned agencies, not to be shared with anyone but the President, presumably. One does not even know whether they exist. And if they did set out those targets, only President Duterte is aware of them and can make an assessment.

Which is why Mr. Duterte’s self-assessment—that his administration has failed with respect to the drug problem—can only be taken at face value. Understand, we are talking about the success or failure of these programs, using the government’s own standards as our metric.

One can only wonder: What is so delicate about crime and drugs that national security could be endangered by transparency surrounding the targets for their vanquishment? There is no dearth of published statistics on crime and drugs by the PNP and PDEA in government websites. Why were they not required to give the PDP what their targets were, so the PSA could monitor their performance with the same rigor that is applied with respect to other government agencies, like Agriculture, Trade and Industry, etc.?

It makes no sense. But then, what does, in this administration?

——————

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How Duterte’s ‘war on drugs’ is being significantly opposed within the Philippines

David Lozada

When I was a journalist during the first year of Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency, I reported on a nationwide series of protests that commemorated International Human Rights Day on December 10, 2016.

Thousands took to the streets in regional centres across the Philippine archipelago, protesting the human rights abuses of the government’s so-called ‘war on drugs’ (WOD). This was one of the first major mobilisations against the WOD and it certainly wasn’t the last.

As the WOD rages on, even amid the COVID-19 pandemic , it has been opposed within the Philippines and outside it. Although international opposition has received more widespread attention in recent months, I argue that domestic contestations have to be given more significant focus, especially with the upcoming Philippine presidential elections in May 2022.

Close examination of those contesting the WOD, especially within the Philippines, is an important first step to understanding the goals, motivations, and relative effectiveness of these contestations. It also allows us to understand relationship patterns between different actors in the Philippine polity.

The bloody ‘War on Drugs’

When President Duterte came to power in June 2016, he immediately fulfilled his campaign promise to stamp out criminality by launching his bloody WOD. Duterte framed the problem of illegal drugs as crucial to the survival of the Philippine nation. Illegal drug users and peddlers were framed as dangerous ‘others ’ that threatened the safety of the Filipino people—the ‘good’ us.

The day after he was sworn in, police officers began arresting and killing alleged drug users under Operation Tokhang (which focused on urban poor slums) and Operation Double Barrel (targeting alleged drug lords). After six months, Amnesty International reported that more than 7,000 Filipinos had been killed in the WOD. The total number of drug war deaths remains contested. The official number from the Philippine National Police is 5,526 as of December 2020. However, this does not include the thousands of extra-judicial killings carried out by armed vigilantes. Domestic human rights groups have estimated the total number of WOD deaths at 27,000 as of December 2020.

The President’s actions have attracted local and international opposition. On the international side, the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) prosecutor, on 14 June 2021, sought full authorisation from the tribunal to open a full investigation into the WOD. Outgoing Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said ‘there is a reasonable basis to believe that the Crime Against Humanity of Murder was committed’ in the country between July 1, 2016 and March 16, 2019 in the context of the government’s WOD. If the investigation proceeds, judges can issue summons and even arrest orders—with Duterte and his top officials being named respondents.

The UN Human Rights Council and the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR) are some of the biggest international critics of the WOD. In July 2019, the UN Human Rights Council voted to set up an investigation into alleged abuses. In October 2020, however, instead of launching a comprehensive investigation, the Human Rights Council passed a resolution providing technical assistance to the Philippines on areas of accountability, data gathering of violations by the police, and a rights-based approach to drug control.

Meanwhile, the OHCHR has been critical of the WOD since reports of the abuses surfaced in 2016. The office has repeatedly asked the Philippine government to allow independent rapporteurs to investigate the WOD. In response, Duterte resorted to name-calling and threatened UN rapporteur Agnes Callamard with violence should she come to the Philippines.

Much academic attention has been given to the international consequences of the WOD under international law on genocide , the Responsibility to Protect , and possible prosecution in the ICC . On the domestic side, the media have played an important role in reporting the human rights abuses of the WOD (for example, see Rappler’s Impunity Series ). Researchers have also problematised the patterns of drug war killings , the WOD’s implications on human rights practice , and the use of police violence .

What is missing is an analysis of the contestations happening against Duterte’s WOD at the domestic level. What types of contestations are happening against the WOD locally? Who are carrying out these contestations; and are they influencing the government?

Classifying domestic contestations

I classify the various contestations, or mobilisations (ie specific movements), being carried out domestically in the WOD in three ways:

Political mobilisations, including mass protests, local and international lobbying, and advocacy networks.
Legal mobilisations, such as filing local cases against the WOD
Social mobilisation, including rehabilitation programs for drug users and trauma counselling for survivors and their families.

I contextualise these contestations by using political scientist Michael Goodhart ’s understanding of human rights as political demands. Goodhart argues that human rights should be understood as ‘demands for emancipation, for an end to domination and oppression.’ In terms of power, Goodhart notes that human rights confront ‘the ideology of arbitrary power and inherited or exclusive privilege with the ideology of freedom and equality for all. This definition of human rights is most apt to understanding how human rights are mobilised and used to contest the WOD in the Philippines. Human rights as political demands also fall within the protest school of Marie-Benedicte Dembour ’s four schools of human rights. The protest school understands human rights as an avenue to redress injustices, realised through ‘a perpetual struggle.’

Furthermore, most WOD abuses and deaths are happening in urban poor areas. This has led Amnesty International and others to call the WOD a ‘war against the poor.’ I therefore use political economists Jane Hutchison and Ian Wilson ’s analysis of the urban poor in the Philippines, which acknowledges the urban poor’s agency in political participation, and in their reliance on non-government organisations for more disruptive forms of politics.

Political mobilisations: mass protests and international lobbying

Most Philippine civil society organisations including NGOs, advocacy networks and academic institutions, were active in terms of traditional protests and local and domestic lobbying as soon as the WOD abuses started. As noted earlier, Human Rights Day (December 10), has become a traditional protest day against the abuses of the WOD. Other Philippine holidays, like the February 25 commemoration of the 1986 People Power Revolution (also known as the EDSA Revolution) has also been used to criticise the WOD .

The most influential of the local actors are the Catholic Church and the Philippine Left. The Philippines is the biggest Catholic nation in Asia due to its Spanish colonial history. The Church played a key role in the ousting of the Marcos dictatorship, and, according to historian Lisandro Claudio , even co-opted the narrative of the 1986 EDSA People Power Revolution. Political scientist Eva-Lotta Hedman also provided a historical analysis of the Church’s role as part of the dominant bloc of Philippine civil society, and their roles in crises of authority in Philippine politics since the 1950s.

Bishops have not only used the pulpits to condemn the WOD as ‘immoral and illegal’ acts but others have conducted more brazen acts of resistance by sheltering WOD victims . However, the Church has been an ambivalent critic of WOD, because its leadership is divided on the issue. For example, some Catholic Church leaders in Mindanao , the region from which Duterte is from, have been supportive of the WOD and others have been subdued out of fear of retribution.

Another influential actor in political contestations against the WOD is the Philippine Left, which has the most capacity among other domestic groups to mobilise protests against the Duterte administration. It should be noted that the Philippine Left is not a homogenous organisation but one with several divergent factions. The biggest split is between the ‘reaffirmists’ who adhere to the Maoist-inspired Communist movement organised by Jose Ma Sison, and the ‘rejectionists’ who broke away from Sison. The reaffirmists, also known as the national democrats, allied itself with Duterte during the early part of his presidency while the rejectionists did not.

As Emerson Sanchez and Jayson Lamchek noted, the national democratic faction’s alliance with the government meant that their criticisms of the WOD were muted, and their legitimacy was questioned by those outside their influence. When the military generals who were uncomfortable with Duterte’s alliance with the Reds finally convinced the commander-in-chief to cut ties with the government, the Philippine Left increased its mobilisation against the Duterte administration. In response, the government created the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict , which has been conducting a campaign to delegitimise the Philippine Left. The Taskforce has been accused of ‘red-tagging ’ activists and advocates, and linking them to the Communist Party of the Philippines.

Aside from mass protests, another form of domestic contestation against the WOD has been lobbying. Local groups have put more focus on lobbying international organisations to influence the Philippine state’s actions on the WOD more than on lobbying local politicians to act against the Executive. Partly this is because, given the oligarchic nature of the Philippine legislature, Duterte holds a super majority in both houses of Congress. As soon as Duterte won the polls, major political parties signed a coalition with the president’s party , PDP-Laban. The 2019 Midterm Elections further solidified Duterte’s hold on the legislative , with the opposition failing to win any of the 12 senate seats up for grabs.

Duterte has subdued many political leaders with fear. Early in his presidency, Senator Leila De Lima initiated a probe into the WOD abuses in July 2016. By August 2016, the Duterte government had named her as an illegal drug lord. She has been detained since February 2017 for alleged violations of the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act of 2002. De Lima’s experience has served as a chilling example to many Filipino politicians.

On the international side, CSOs have lobbied international organisations to put pressure on the Duterte government to stop the abuses. As early as August 2016, over 300 Philippine NGOs have asked UN agencies, particularly the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, to condemn the killings. Groups such as Karapatan (Alliance for the Advancement of People’s Rights) an alliance of organisations working to promote and protect human rights in the Philippines, have also lobbied the UN Human Rights C ouncil to investigate the killings. Groups have also relied on transnational advocacy networks to pressure the Human Rights Council to act. A Human Rights Council resolution in October resulted from this lobbying, but some felt it was a missed opportunity to conduct a more rigorous investigation.

Legal mobilisations in the Supreme Court

Sociologist Cecilia MacDowell Santos defines legal mobilisation as the ‘practice of translating a perceived harm into a demand expressed as an assertion of rights,’ translated into a complaint presented to a court.

According to scholar Andrew Rosser , legal mobilisations are closely tied to justiciable legal frameworks for the protection of human rights that ‘ensure that government policies protect human rights, bureaucracies implement rights. But in developing country contexts, justiciable legal frameworks for the protection of human rights have a higher chance of succeeding when litigants have access to support structures for legal mobilisations, as in the example of education rights cases in Indonesia. In the WOD, civil society organisations can be seen as support structure to the extent that they empower victims to file cases against the government.

A leading organisation that has been helping victims file cases relating to the WOD is the Free Legal Assistance Group (FLAG), the oldest network of human rights lawyers in the Philippines. In October 2017, FLAG petitioned the Supreme Court to declare the WOD unconstitutional on the basis that:

there was no legal written order from the president regarding the WOD;
the Philippine National Police’s memorandum circular unlawfully empowered police to kill alleged drug users; and
reporting of alleged drug users is done anonymously via tip offs, ‘without any safeguards for protecting innocent persons’. This effectively means anyone can be added to the drug users lists without due process.

Another prominent case led by FLAG under its current chairman, Atty Jose Manual Diokno, was that of 17-year-old Kian delos Santos, who was killed in an anti-drug operation in Caloocan City on August 16, 2017. FLAG provided legal assistance to the Delos Santos family and filed cases against the police to the Caloocan City Regional Trial Court. The court found three policemen guilty of murder in November 2018.

The results have been mixed. The Supreme Court has not ruled on the FLAG petition and has sided with the Duterte government in other cases like dismissing the petition questioning the validity of Duterte’s withdrawal from the ICC. However, the court has criticised the WOD in some decisions. In June 2020, for example, the court used their ruling in People of the Philippines vs. Jerry Sapla to emphasise the importance of upholding the Bill of Rights in relation to the WOD.

Social mobilisations: helping survivors

Social mobilisation against the WOD has been in the form of providing rehabilitative services to former illegal drug users and families of WOD victims. This type of contestation is indirect because it focuses more on survivors, but NGOs carrying out such activities also lobby against the WOD.

A good example is Rise Up for Life and for Rights , an alliance started in response to the WOD killings. Rise up focuses on mothers of victims slain in the WOD. They facilitate grief and trauma workshops and provide psycho-social support for mothers and other family members of victims, while actively advocating for the government to stop and investigate the killings.

Another organisation that empowers survivors is the Solidarity with Orphan and Widows created by a local Catholic parish church in Barangay Payatas. Aside from providing psychological and social support, SOW also partners with private organisations and individuals to provide jobs for grieving families.

Meanwhile, the Center for Christian Recovery provides rehabilitation services including medical, psychological and trauma treatment to former drug users.

Most NGOs working in the social mobilisation space are religious in nature. SOW follows tenets of Catholicism while Rise Up and Center for Christian Recovery follow evangelical doctrines. These organisations’ religious underpinnings shape their approach towards rehabilitation. Their religious backgrounds also highlight the influence of the Catholic and other Christian Churches in shaping civil society movements in the Philippines.

To what extent do these mobilisations and contestations impact the WOD?

Deeper analysis of the socio-political context in the Philippines, and data gathering with local actors are needed to understand the goals, strategies, and impacts of these contestations.

The high level of Duterte’s popularity and the fact that the WOD continues, shows that these mobilisations have had minimal effect in terms of mitigating the human rights impacts of the WOD. Despite five years of WOD human rights violations, Duterte has maintained high approval ratings. In December 2019 , before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Duterte’s net satisfaction rating stood at 72 percent, according to the Social Weather Station . In October 2020, eight months into the pandemic, the most recent Pulse Asia survey showed that 91 percent of Filipinos were satisfied with Duterte’s performance while his trust rating was at 87 percent. Pulse Asia, one of the Philippines’ most credible poll firms, noted that Duterte may end his term as the most popular president ever, maintaining an approval rating of above 75 percent for most of his term.

But I argue the contestations outlined above have had significant impact. Political mobilisations have resulted in increasing international pressure from international organisations. This pressure led Duterte’s Department of Justice to conduct its own investigation on the WOD even if this has not led to local prosecutions of police . However, the absence of the Commission on Human Rights and local NGOs in the investigations also highlight the limitations of self-reporting in human rights .

Legal mobilisations have led to the Supreme Court criticising some aspects of the WOD like illegal searches and anonymous tip offs, while upholding individual rights against the abuse of these processes upholding individual rights against illegal searches and anonymous tip offs to police. The Court also ordered the release of tens of thousands of documents related to the WOD killings. This action can be used as the basis for future legal cases and investigations.

Lastly, social mobilisations have led to rehabilitation programs that have a positive impact on the well-being and safety of former drug users and family members of slain drug users. This impact is not insignificant to many individuals’ personal circumstances.

Duterte is set to step down in June 2022, and his daughter, Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte , is a potential successor for the administration. Opposition groups have already launched a broad coalition, 1Sambayanan , to field candidates against the Duterte administration.

Whether the WOD will continue depends largely on who wins the May 2022 presidential elections. Perhaps, the biggest and most effective contestation against the WOD will be the democratic process that resulted in Duterte’s election as President. But for this to happen, it is crucial for opposition groups to make the WOD a key election issue and to continue engaging presidential hopefuls about it. Doing so creates the possibility of claiming justice for the victims and survivors.

Image: A demonstration against the ‘war on drugs’, Philippines, 2017. Credit: 350.org/Flickr .

Date: July 12, 2021 |
DOI: 10.37839/MAR2652-550X7.4 |
Edition: Edition 7, 2021

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Confronting the Philippines' war on drugs: A literature review

Jayson S. Lamchek , T. Jopson
Published in Sociology Compass 20 April 2024
Political Science, Sociology

One Citation

Political constructions of people who use drugs in the philippines: a qualitative content analysis., 58 references, is the philippine “war on drugs” an act of genocide, a new penal populism rodrigo duterte, public opinion, and the war on drugs in the philippines, securitization in the philippines’ drug war, drug testing in philippine schools: historical overview and implications for drug policy., governing through killing: the war on drugs in the philippines, overcoming and penalizing precarity: narratives of drug personalities arrested in the philippine war on drugs, drugs and drug wars as populist tropes in asia: illustrative examples and implications for drug policy., police violence and corruption in the philippines: violent exchange and the war on drugs, failing to fulfil the responsibility to protect: the war on drugs as crimes against humanity in the philippines, collusion or collision the war on drugs in the philippines, related papers.

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Philippines’ War on Drugs: Its Implications to Human Rights in Social Work Practice

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Volume 3 , pages 138–148, ( 2018 )

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Since President Rodrigo Roa Duterte’s ascension to the presidency in July 2016, he weaves and pursues his own brand of authoritarianism. Riding on his popularity, he raises the issue of illegal drugs as a question of national survival for the nation. With this obsession, Duterte has unleashed the entire police force with the state’s resources on his war on drugs. In more than a year of its implementation, the war on drugs has created havoc in the lives of the Filipino people. Furthermore, it has promoted a culture of impunity, and fear has gripped the nation. With the worsening human rights situation, human rights in social work practice in the Philippines grapples with the multi-faceted effects of the war on drugs. Given the specificity of needs and circumstances of the violations, the social work profession can and should respond to the unfolding challenges through various interventions at the individual, family, and community levels.

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Espenido, G. Philippines’ War on Drugs: Its Implications to Human Rights in Social Work Practice. J. Hum. Rights Soc. Work 3 , 138–148 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41134-018-0071-6

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“If you are poor you are killed”: Extrajudicial Executions in the Philippines’ “War on Drugs”

January 27, 2017

Philippines: The police’s murderous war on the poor

· Extrajudicial executions may amount to crimes against humanity

· Police plant evidence, take under-the-table cash and fabricate reports

· Paid killers on police payroll

Acting on instructions from the very top of government, the Philippines police have killed and paid others to kill thousands of alleged drug offenders in a wave of extrajudicial executions that may amount to crimes against humanity, Amnesty International said in a report published today.

Amnesty International’s investigation, “ If you are poor you are killed”: Extrajudicial Executions in the Philippines’ “War on Drugs ” details how the police have systematically targeted mostly poor and defenceless people across the country while planting “evidence”, recruiting paid killers, stealing from the people they kill and fabricating official incident reports.

“This is not a war on drugs, but a war on the poor. Often on the flimsiest of evidence, people accused of using or selling drugs are being killed for cash in an economy of murder,” said Tirana Hassan, Amnesty International’s Crisis Response Director.

“Under President Duterte’s rule, the national police are breaking laws they are supposed to uphold while profiting from the murder of impoverished people the government was supposed to be uplift. The same streets Duterte vowed to rid of crime are now filled with bodies of people illegally killed by his own police.”

Incited by the rhetoric of President Rodrigo Duterte, the police, paid killers on their payroll, and unknown armed individuals have slain more than a thousand people a month under the guise of a national campaign to eradicate drugs. Since President Rodrigo Duterte came to office seven months ago, there have been more than 7,000 drug-related killings, with the police directly killing at least 2,500 alleged drug offenders.

Amnesty International’s investigation, documents in detail 33 cases that involved the killings of 59 people. Researchers interviewed 110 people across the Philippines’ three main geographical divisions, detailing extrajudicial executions in 20 cities across the archipelago. The organisation also examined documents, including police reports.

Extrajudicial executions are unlawful and deliberate killings carried out by officials, by order of a government or with its complicity or acquiescence. Extrajudicial executions violate the right to life as enshrined in both Philippine and international law.

Killing unarmed people and fabricating police reports

The report documents how the police, working from unverified lists of people allegedly using or selling drugs, stormed into homes and shot dead unarmed people, including those prepared to surrender.

Fabricating their subsequent incident reports, the police have routinely claimed that they had been fired upon first. Directly contradicting the police’s claims, witnesses told Amnesty International how the police conducted late night raids, did not attempt an arrest, and opened fire on unarmed persons. In some cases, witnesses said, the police planted drugs and weapons they later claimed as evidence.

In one case in Batangas City, a victim’s wife described how the police shot dead her husband at close range as she pleaded with them for mercy. After her husband was dead, the police grabbed her, dragged her outside and beat her, leaving bruises.

In Cebu City, when Gener Rondina saw a large contingent of police officers surround his home, he appealed to them to spare his life and said he was ready to surrender. “The police kept pounding [and] when they go in he was shouting, ‘I will surrender, I will surrender, sir,’” a witness told Amnesty International.

The police ordered Gener Rondina to lie down on the floor as they told another person in the room to leave. Witnesses then heard gunshots ring out.A witness recalled them “carrying him like a pig” out of the house and then placing his body near a sewer before eventually loading it into a vehicle.

When family members were allowed back in the house six hours after Gener’s death, they described seeing blood splattered everywhere. Valuables including a laptop, watch, and money were missing, and, according to family members, had not been returned or accounted for by police in the official inventory of the crime scene.

Gener’s father, Generoso, served in the police force for 24 years before retiring in 2009. He told Amnesty International he was “ashamed” of his son’s drug use. He also professed support for the government’s anti-drug efforts. “But what they did was too much,” he said. “Why kill someone who had already surrendered?”

Other people Amnesty International spoke to similarly described the dehumanization of their loved ones, who were ruthlessly killed, then dragged and dumped.

“The way dead bodies are treated shows how cheaply human life is regarded by the Philippines police. Covered in blood, they are casually dragged in front of horrified relatives, their heads grazing the ground before being dumped out in the open,” said Tirana Hassan.

“The people killed are overwhelmingly drawn from the poorest sections of society and include children, one of them as young as eight years old.”

In the few cases where the police have targeted foreign meth gangs, they have demonstrated that they can carry out arrests without resort to lethal force. The fact that poor people are denied the same protection and respect has hardened perceptions that this is a war on the poor.

An economy of murder

The police killings are driven by pressures from the top, including an order to “neutralize” alleged drug offenders, as well as financial incentives they have created an informal economy of death, the report details.

Speaking to Amnesty International, a police officer with the rank of Senior Police Officer 1, who has served in the force for a decade and conducts operations as part of an anti-illegal drugs unit in Metro Manila, described how the police are paid per “encounter” the term used to falsely present extrajudicial executions as legitimate operations.

“We always get paid by the encounter…The amount ranges from 8,000 pesos (US $161) to 15,000 pesos (US $302)… That amount is per head. So if the operation is against four people, that’s 32,000 pesos (US $644)… We’re paid in cash, secretly, by headquarters…There’s no incentive for arresting. We’re not paid anything.”

The chilling incentive to kill people rather than arrest them was underscored by the Senior Police Officer, who added: “It never happens that there’s a shootout and no one is killed.”

The experienced frontline police officer told Amnesty International that some police have established a racket with funeral homes, who reward them for each dead body sent their way. Witnesses told Amnesty International that the police also enrich themselves by stealing from the victims’ homes, including objects of sentimental value.

The police are behaving like the criminal underworld that they are supposed to be enforcing the law against, by carrying out extrajudicial executions disguised as unknown killers and “contracting out” killings.

More than 4,100 of the drug-related killings in the Philippines over the past six months have been carried out by unknown armed individuals. “Riding in tandem”, as the phenomenon is known locally, two motorcycle-borne people arrive, shoot their targets dead, and speed away.

Two paid killers told Amnesty International that they take orders from a police officer who pays them 5,000 pesos (US $100) for each drug user killed and 10,000 to 15,000 pesos (US $200-300) for each “drug pusher” killed. Before Duterte took power, the paid killers said, they had two “jobs” a month. Now, they have three or four a week.

The targets often come from unverified lists of people suspected to use or sell drugs drawn up by local government officials. Regardless of how long ago someone may have taken drugs, or how little they used or sold, they can find their names irrevocably added to the lists.

In other cases, their names could be added arbitrarily, because of a vendetta or because there are incentives to kill greater numbers of people deemed drug users and sellers.

Possible crimes against humanity

The Philippines is a state party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. In October 2016, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda, issued in a statement expressing concerns over the killings and indicating her office may initiate a preliminary examination into possible crimes under the Rome Statute.

Amnesty International is deeply concerned that the deliberate, widespread and systematic killings of alleged drug offenders, which appear to be planned and organized by the authorities, may constitute crimes against humanity under international law.

“What is happening in the Philippines is a crisis the entire world should be alarmed by. We are calling on the government, from President Duterte down, to order an immediate halt to all extrajudicial executions. We are also calling on the Philippines Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute anyone involved in these killings, regardless of their rank or status in the police or government,” said Tirana Hassan.

“The Philippines should move away from lawlessness and lethal violence and reorient its drug policies towards a model based on the protection of health and human rights.

“We want the Philippines authorities to deal with this human rights crisis on their own. But if decisive action is not taken soon, the international community should turn to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to carry out a preliminary examination into these killings, including the involvement of officials at the very top of the government.”

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A World Court Inches Closer To A Reckoning In The Philippines' War On Drugs

Julie McCarthy

Relatives and friends mourn during Lilibeth Valdez's funeral on June 4 in Manila, Philippines. An off-duty police officer was seen pulling the hair of 52-year-old Valdez, before shooting her dead. The former chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court recommended the court open an investigation into alleged crimes against humanity committed during President Rodrigo Duterte's drug war. Ezra Acayan/Getty Images hide caption

After years of a deadly counternarcotics campaign that has riven the Philippines, the International Criminal Court is a step closer to opening what international law experts say would be its first case bringing crimes against humanity charges in the context of a drug war.

On June 14, the last day of her nine-year term as the ICC's chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda announced there was "a reasonable basis to believe that the crime against humanity of murder" had been committed in the war on drugs carried out under the government of President Rodrigo Duterte. Bensouda urged the court to open a full-scale investigation into the bloody crackdown between July 1, 2016, when Duterte took office, and March 16, 2019, when the Philippines' withdrawal from the ICC took effect.

Said at first to be unfazed by the prosecutor's findings of alleged murder under his watch, Duterte went on to rail against the international court in his June 21 "Talk to the People," vowing, in an invective-filled rant, never to submit to its jurisdiction. "This is bulls***. Why would I defend or face an accusation before white people? You must be crazy," Duterte scoffed. (The 18 judges on the ICC are an ethnically diverse group from around the world . And Bensouda, from Gambia, is the first female African to serve as the court's chief prosecutor.)

The drug war has been a signature policy of President Duterte's administration, and its brutality has drawn international condemnation. But for years the world has stood by as allegations of human rights violations accumulated, and Duterte barred international investigators. The findings of the chief prosecutor represent the most prominent record to date of the killings committed under the Philippines' anti-narcotics campaign and set the stage for a potential legal reckoning for its perpetrators.

"It wasn't a rushed decision," Manila-based human rights attorney Neri Colmenares says of Bensouda's three years of examination, which "makes the case stronger." He says, "It is not yet justice, but it is a major step toward that."

The prosecutor's findings

Bensouda's final report says the nationwide anti-drug campaign deployed "unnecessary and disproportionate" force. The information the prosecutor gathered suggests "members of Philippine security forces and other, often associated, perpetrators deliberately killed thousands of civilians suspected to be involved in drug activities." The report cites Duterte's statements encouraging law enforcement to kill drug suspects, promising police immunity, and inflating numbers, claiming there were variously "3 million" and "4 million" addicts in the Philippines. The government itself puts the figures of drug users at 1.8 million.

Fatou Bensouda speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in The Hague, Netherlands, June 14, before ending her nine-year tenure as chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court. Peter Dejong/AP hide caption

Fatou Bensouda speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in The Hague, Netherlands, June 14, before ending her nine-year tenure as chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court.

The Philippines' Drug Enforcement Agency reports more than 6,100 drug crime suspects have been killed in police operations since Duterte became president. But Bensouda says, "Police and other government officials planned, ordered, and sometimes directly perpetrated" killings outside official police operations. Independent researchers estimate the drug war's death toll, including those extrajudicial killings, could be as high as 12,000 to 30,000 .

The international court's now former prosecutor based her findings on evidence gathered in part from families of slain suspects, their testimonials redacted from her report to protect their identities. She cited rights groups such as Amnesty International that detailed how police planted evidence at crime scenes, fabricated official reports, and pilfered belongings from victims' homes.

Colmenares, who is a former congressman, says the police appeared to have a modus operandi. "Sometimes the police would go into the house and segregate the family from the father or the son, and then later on the father and the son would be killed. The witnesses say that the husband was already kneeling or raising their hand," he says.

Colmenares says in the prevailing atmosphere of impunity in the Philippines, families are "courageous" for bearing witness.

Police self-defense debunked

Police have justified the killings by saying that the suspects put up a struggle, requiring the use of deadly force, a scenario they call nanlaban . Duterte himself said last week, "We kill them because they fight back." Duterte fears that if drastic measures were not taken, the Philippines could wind up in the sort of destabilizing narco-conflict that afflicts Mexico. "What will then happen to my country?"

Bensouda rejects police claims that they acted in self-defense, citing witness testimony, and findings of rights groups such as Amnesty International .

In February, the Philippines' own Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra conceded to the United Nations Human Rights Council that the police's nanlaban argument is often deeply flawed. His ministry had reviewed many incident reports where police said suspects were killed in shootouts. "Yet, no full examination of the weapon recovered was conducted. No verification of its ownership was undertaken. No request for ballistic examination or paraffin test was pursued," he said .

Supporters of Kian delos Santos attend a vigil on Nov. 29, 2018, outside a Manila police station where officers thought to be involved in the teenager's killing were assigned. Three Philippine policemen were sentenced to decades in prison for murdering delos Santos during an anti-narcotics sweep. Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Despite that, only a single case has resulted in the prosecution and conviction of three police officers for the murder of 17-year-old Kian delos Santos in August 2017, after the incident sparked national outrage. Police accused delos Santos, a student, of being a drug-runner, a charge his family denied. When the teenager was found dead in an alley, police said they had killed him in self-defense. CCTV footage contradicted the police version of events.

"Duterte Harry"

Bensouda buttresses her case by citing Duterte's 22 years as mayor of Davao City on the island of Mindanao, where her report says he "publicly supported and encouraged the killing of petty criminals and drug dealers," ostensibly to enforce discipline on a city besieged by crime, a communist rebellion, and an active counterinsurgency campaign .

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Former police officials testified to the existence of a death squad that acted on the orders of then-Mayor Duterte and which rights groups allege carried out more than 1,400 killings .

Bensouda's report says Duterte's central focus on fighting crime and drug use earned him monikers such as " The Punisher " and " Duterte Harry ," and in 2016 he rode that strongman image to the presidency in a country that had been battling drug syndicates for decades and was weary of crime.

A policeman comes out of the shanty home of two brothers and an unidentified man who were killed during an operation as part of the continuing war on drugs in Manila, Philippines, Oct. 6, 2016. Aaron Favila/AP hide caption

A policeman comes out of the shanty home of two brothers and an unidentified man who were killed during an operation as part of the continuing war on drugs in Manila, Philippines, Oct. 6, 2016.

In a 2016 address to the national police, he warned drug criminals who would harm the nation's sons and daughters: "I will kill you, I will kill you. I will take the law into my own hands. ... Forget about the laws of men, forget about the laws of international order."

American University international law professor Diane Orentlicher says the ICC prosecutor reached back to the ultra-aggressive approach Duterte first deployed in Davao City to show that "there were the same kind of summary executions earlier in the Philippines." Orentlicher says it identifies "continuity of certain patterns" and the threat they pose "over almost a quarter of a century."

Obstacles ahead

While the finding of possible crimes against humanity is a significant step in the ICC's scrutiny, formidable hurdles remain before any prosecutor could formally name perpetrators or issue indictments.

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Firstly, President Duterte denies any wrongdoing, unambiguously vows not to cooperate in an international court investigation, and could stonewall the effort in his last year in office. And despite the bloodshed, and mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic , Duterte's " crude everyman " image still appeals to a majority of Filipinos.

Orentlicher says building a crimes against humanity case is complex, involving potentially thousands of victims "over time [and] over territory." While human rights activists would like to see Duterte in the dock, linking the alleged crimes to individual perpetrators is a massive evidentiary undertaking.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte delivers a speech in Quezon City, Philippines, on June 25. Ace Morandante/Malacanang Presidential Photographers Division via AP hide caption

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte delivers a speech in Quezon City, Philippines, on June 25.

Powerful leaders facing scrutiny, she says, have been able to "interfere with witnesses, obstruct justice [and] intimidate people who would be key sources for the prosecutor." While the most senior officials are the ones the public expects the world court to take on, Orentlicher says they "are in the best position to keep a prosecutor from getting the evidence."

David Bosco, author of a book about the International Criminal Court titled Rough Justice, says it's also entirely possible the judges may not authorize an investigation. Bosco says it would not be because the Philippine case lacks merit, rather he says the plethora of allegations involving possible war crimes from Afghanistan to Nigeria to the Gaza Strip has the court overstretched.

"And even if the judges were to authorize an investigation, then you're talking about trying to launch an investigation when you have a hostile government," Bosco says. "So I think this is a very long road before we get to any perpetrator seeing the inside of a courtroom."

But Bosco adds prosecutors who have opened an ICC investigation have also been content to have the case lie dormant for long periods.

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"And then they revive," he says. "And so, we shouldn't ignore the possibility that there could be political changes in the Philippines that suddenly make a new government much more amenable to cooperating. So things could change."

Bosco says a potential investigation of the Philippines is also important because it raises the critical question: whether a state that has joined the ICC and then subsequently has come under scrutiny can "immunize itself by leaving the court." As the chief prosecutor persisted in examining the country's drug war, the Philippines withdrew as a member of the ICC.

Bosco believes the fact Bensouda sought authorization for her successor to open an investigation into the Philippines is "an important signal that the court is still going to pursue countries that have left the ICC once they've come under scrutiny."

Orentlicher says the court may look to the case of Burundi, the first country to leave the ICC. Prosecutors have continued to investigate alleged crimes against humanity committed in the country before it withdrew in 2017.

Decades of drug wars

The focus on the Philippines comes at a time when countries around the world are questioning heavy-handed counternarcotics tactics. That includes the United States, whose war on drugs dates back to at least 1971 when President Richard Nixon called for an "all-out offensive" against drug abuse and addiction.

The War On Drugs: 50 Years Later

"Over the last 50 years, we've unfortunately seen the 'War on Drugs' be used as an excuse to declare war on people of color, on poor Americans and so many other marginalized groups," New York Attorney General Letitia James said .

Likewise, the former ICC chief prosecutor Bensouda notes that the Philippines' drug fight has been called a "war on the poor" as the most affected group "has been poor, low-skilled residents of impoverished urban areas."

Drug addiction, especially crystal meth, known locally as shabu , grips the Philippines. Just this month, the national police said that security forces have been "seizing large volumes of shabu left and right," an acknowledgment that drugs remain rampant five years into the brutal drug war.

An aerial view shows Filipinos observing social distancing as they take part in a protest against President Duterte's anti-terrorism bill on June 12, 2020, in Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines. Critics says the legislation gives the state power to violate due process, privacy and other basic rights of Filipino citizens. Ezra Acayan/Getty Images hide caption

Calls are mounting for greater attention to drug prevention and public health for drug users. "Heavy suppression efforts marked by extra-judicial killings and street arrests were not going to slow down demand," Jeremy Douglas, Southeast Asia representative for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, told Reuters .

Edcel C. Lagman, a long-serving member of the Philippine Congress, recently wrote in the Manila Times that the ammunition needed in this war includes drug-abuse prevention education, skill training and "well-funded health interventions" to "reintegrate former drug dependent into society."

The Philippine National Police's narcotics chief himself, Col. Romeo Caramat, acknowledged that the violent approach to curbing illicit drugs has not been effective. "Shock and awe definitely did not work," he told Reuters in 2020.

A long, tough process

Philippine Journalist Maria Ressa: 'Journalism Is Activism'

Even if the ICC decides to open a formal investigation, Orentlicher says Duterte's defiance should not be underestimated. Journalists who have exposed the drug war have been jailed, and human rights advocates who have spoken out, including members of the clergy, have been threatened.

"This is going to be a very tough process," Orentlicher says, "not for the faint of heart at all."

Portraits of alleged victims of the Philippine war on drugs are displayed during a protest on July 22, 2019, in Manila. Richard James Mendoza/NurPhoto via Getty Images hide caption

Portraits of alleged victims of the Philippine war on drugs are displayed during a protest on July 22, 2019, in Manila.

Human rights attorney Colmenares maintains a cautious optimism that there will be a legal reckoning on behalf of the victims' families who want justice.

"It may be long and it may be arduous," Colmenares says, "but that's how struggles are fought and that's how struggles are won."

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Years Later, Philippines Reckons With Duterte’s Brutal Drug War

A president’s vow to fight drugs unleashed violence and fostered a culture of impunity. But the crimes are finally getting a look, including from the International Criminal Court.

A woman squats in front of a wall of small doors, touching the wall with one hand. Two lit candles sit on the floor in front of her.

By Sui-Lee Wee and Camille Elemia

Reporting from Manila

When Rodrigo Duterte was running for president eight years ago, he vowed to order the police and the military to find drug users and traffickers to kill them, promising immunity for such killings. In the months after, police officers and vigilantes mercilessly gunned down tens of thousands of people in summary executions.

Even now, two years after Mr. Duterte left office, there has been little legal reckoning with the wave of killings : Only eight police officers have been given prison sentences, in connection with just four cases, with one verdict that came this month. And though rights groups say that there have been fewer such killings since Mr. Duterte left, and far fewer involving agents of the government, a culture of violence and impunity has maintained a troubling hold in the Philippines.

In recent months, the legacy of Mr. Duterte’s so-called war on drugs has slowly begun to get more official attention. Lawmakers are holding several public hearings into the violence. Senior police officers spoke at the congressional hearing, as did victims’ relatives, who relived their horrors and again pleaded for justice.

When Mr. Duterte left office, his administration said 6,252 people had been killed by security forces — all described by officials as “drug suspects.” Rights groups say the overall death toll stands at roughly 30,000.

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Dissonant Narratives of the Philippine War on Drugs

by Filomin C. Gutierrez

June 26, 2020

When Rodrigo Duterte assumed the presidency in the Philippines in July 2016, a war on drugs was immediately cascaded into Philippine communities. This campaign saw members of the Philippine National Police coaxing drug users to voluntarily surrender and pledge to cease the habit, with over a million “drug personalities” surrendering just six months into Duterte’s administration. The anti-drug campaign was popularly known as Oplan Tokhang, a portmanteau term for toktok and hangyo , which means “to knock” and “to plead,” respectively, in the Cebuano language. Since 2016, tokhang has become a euphemism for extra-judicial killing (EJK) by either the authorities or anti-drug vigilantes.

The rising death toll of the drug war drew criticism from human rights groups. Official sources reported that as of July 2019, some 5,375 drug personalities have been killed in police operations. Human rights groups estimate that the overall death toll, which includes EJKs, has reached beyond 25,000. The International Criminal Court (ICC) started investigating Duterte for crimes against humanity in February 2018. Public opinion surveys by the Social Weather Stations (SWS) in late 2019 indicated that 75% of Filipinos believe that many human rights abuses took place as a result of Oplan Tokhang.

The war on drugs generated enormous interest among Filipino social science researchers, most of whom are sensitized to the human rights perspective. Conflicting death toll estimates, along with contrasting assessments of the extent and severity of the drug problem, matched the debates surrounding the morals and politics of the anti-illegal drug campaign between the authorities, human rights groups, and experts, including social researchers.

Narratives of suffering from those arrested and widows of those who were killed compose the backdrop of a new, violent Philippine reality. This reality is attended by the paradox of hyper-stigmatization of drug use by the current political and criminal justice regime vis-à-vis the “normalized proliferation” of drugs, articulated by the term talamak (chronic), commonly used by arrested persons, media, and much of the public.

In my own studies, I struggled to make sense of the dissonant narratives of suspected drug offenders, specifically involving the stimulant methamphetamine (locally known as shabu ). I interviewed 27 men in jail, most of whom are working-class individuals in their early and middle-to-late adulthood arrested in the first year of Oplan Tokhang on drug-related charges. They claimed that they had been wrongly arrested, that police officers planted evidence, and that they were mistreated or tortured to confess their guilt. They described their plight as walang kalaban-laban (defenseless) against the police who forcefully descended into their dwellings. Despite their tragic personal plight, many of them still support Duterte’s anti-drug campaign because it represents a decisive action against a worsening drug situation that had long been ignored.

Clearly, the “drug offenders” are very much a part of the “penal populist” public that generated support for Duterte’s presidency in 2016. A moral panic about the rising number of drug addicts and unsafe neighborhoods propped up the resurgence of penal populism, a term proposed by John Pratt as an approach that adopts more punitive measures against criminality based on public sentiments rather than on empirical evidence or expert opinions. This can be observed in public opinion polls released by SWS at the end of 2019 indicating that Duterte enjoyed a net satisfaction rating of 72% from Filipinos, and his war on drugs a net satisfaction rating of 70%.

Prior to Duterte’s presidency, studies by Gideon Lasco showed that the youths of a Philippine port community used shabu as pampagilas (performance enhancer) for their work in the informal sector (e.g., vendors, porters, sex workers). Similarly, participants in my study also confessed to using shabu to regain strength from tiredness, stay awake, and take up jobs that are either hard to come by or require long unpredictable hours (e.g., truck and jeepney drivers, construction workers). They refused to be called “addicts” because, in their belief, they can stop anytime they wish, and they don’t let it become a habitual vice. That they purchase it using their own wages and not with funds derived from theft, robbery, or any other crime confers shabu the legitimacy of a consumer commodity in the open market. The scope of analysis of its use, therefore, needs to go beyond notions of leisure or retreatism and subcultural theories of addiction, and toward its function as a mainstream means to cope with the stresses of poverty and economic precarity.

Despite the participants’ defense of their drug use, the denouement of my conversations with them was their recognition that shabu is a “destroyer of families,” “a source of criminality,” “ultimately evil,” and “a national problem,” which must be eradicated. One key aspect of their narrative is that the misinformed police made a mistake in capturing them instead of targeting those who are truly guilty: addicts who commit heinous crimes to support their vice, money-hungry traffickers who exploit them, and corrupt policemen who extort money from the addicts and peddlers.

My preliminary interviews with police officers on Oplan Tokhang also suggest an experience misunderstood by human rights groups and misrepresented by the media. They spoke of their conviction in carrying out the mandate and ideals of protecting the country and its citizens from a drug menace “that does not seem to end.” While they recognize that drugs do fill a vacuum created by poverty and that drug lords economically exploit an addicted and impoverished population, they also regard drug personalities as combatants, armed with weapons, who are ready to retaliate. More importantly, they reflexively look back on Oplan Tokhang as a campaign that has exposed the “true depth of the drug problem,” and how it has “gravely corrupted the police ranks.” If a deep story – an approach used by Arlie Hochschild to capture the experience of right-wing American Republicans – can be told from the narratives of “drug offenders,” it might render a starkly different account of Philippine reality assembled from the narratives of the police.

Social science research on the Philippine war on drugs can indeed contribute to providing evidence-based policies, whether these involve the methodological expertise of quantifying addiction levels, reconceptualizing drug use typologies, or interpreting public opinion on criminality. The challenge for sociology is that it must heed caution about frameworks that offer binaries that reduce the drug question in the Philippines to a battle between the good guys versus bad guys, the addicts versus those who are not, and the good cops versus bad cops. More importantly, sociologists researching the war on drugs must be wary of privileging penal elitism, a term which Victor Shammas uses to refer to an overvaluation of scientific or expert opinion and dismissal of a public regarded as emotional, irrational, or simplistic. Such self-reflexivity then calls for sociologists to be comfortable with contesting narratives within groups of social actors and between the supposed camps of the political and moral spectrum that makes up the public.

Filomin C. Gutierrez, University of the Philippines, Philippines and member of ISA Research Committees on Sociology of Deviance (RC29), and Women, Gender and Society (RC32) < [email protected] >

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Home — Essay Samples — Law, Crime & Punishment — War on Drugs — My Views On The War On Drugs In The Philippines

My Views on The War on Drugs in The Philippines

Categories: Philippines War on Drugs

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Published: Sep 1, 2020

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