Washington D.C., Jul 23, 2017 / 03:02 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte and government officials are guilty of “social cleansing” under the guise of a war on drugs, advocates testified on Capitol Hill on Thursday.
“Duterte and other high officials of the land, having had to find a particular section of Philippine society worthy of elimination, have effectively put in place a de facto social cleansing policy whereby police and vigilantes are not only encouraged, but rewarded and forced to commit extrajudicial killings,” witness Ellecer Carlos told members of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission on Thursday.
The hearing on “The Human Rights Consequences of the War on Drugs in the Philippines” featured Carlos and two other witnesses from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. They testified on reports of extralegal killings in the Philippines as part of President Duterte’s “Operation Plan Tokhang,” the war on drugs.
The witnesses alleged that high-ranking officials in the Philippine government are complicit in human rights abuses where police officers and vigilantes, who may be working for and paid by the police, track down and kill those involved in the drug trade, with evidence present of other abuses like torture.
The targets are disproportionately poor people. “The vast majority of victims of drug-related killings come from the poorest segments of Philippine society,” Matthew Wells, senior crisis advisor at Amnesty International, stated in his written testimony before the commission.
Heads of poor families may be involved in the drug trade as a way to escape poverty, Wells said, or some may use methamphetamines to help stay awake and energized on a long work day. “The death of a breadwinner often puts families in a more precarious position, at times compounded by police officers stealing from them during crime scene investigations,” Wells said.
President Duterte ran for office on a platform of taking strong action against the drug trade in the country, making shocking statements to underline his commitment to action.
“Forget the laws on human rights. If I make it to the presidential palace, I will do just what I did as mayor,” the BBC reported him saying. Duterte was previously the mayor of the city of Davao, where he made a name for himself as the “death squad mayor.”
“You drug pushers, hold-up men and do-nothings, you better go out. Because I’d kill you,” he said while running for president. “I’ll dump all of you into Manila Bay, and fatten all the fish there.”
Duterte was elected president in May of 2016. Since then “his rhetoric quickly became all too real” in the war on drugs, Wells stated in his testimony before the commission.
Police officers and vigilantes had killed over 7,000 persons in the drug trade from July, 2016 through January, 2017, according to numbers provided by the Philippine National Police.
While the authorities kept statistics for the first few months of the spike in drug-related deaths, they stopped providing transparency, Wells said. According to the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, there have been “blatant inconsistencies and a deliberate attempt to conceal the magnitude of the killings” in the war on drugs, Carlos said.
The killings allegedly undertaken by vigilantes were among the worst human rights problems in the country, the State Department noted in its most recent human rights report.
On Tuesday, Wells described how police officers are paid under-the-table for “encounters” with drug traffickers where “offenders are killed,” and that there is a pay scale for killing drug sellers and users. Vigilantes are also handed hit lists of suspects in the drug trade by police. They carry out the killings for the police, offering them some mode of cover.
Many of the killings are made at night, through home invasions or drive-by shootings. The “modus operandi” of the police is to barge in the door of a home of a suspect at night; in the encounter, the suspect is shot but the police can use the cover of darkness to claim that the suspect was the initial aggressor, Phelim Kine, deputy director of the Asia division of Human Rights Watch, said.
More and more citizens have begun sleeping in the streets to be witnesses, taking video of the incidents to ensure that the truth is documented.
A Reuters investigation had uncovered “payments for killings” by police to vigilantes, and showed significant evidence that a “license to kill” had been granted from high levels of government, Wells said.
All this has been an “economy of murder created by the war on drugs, with the police at the center,” Wells said. And there is “scant accountability,” he said, as there have been no convictions of police officers in drug killings and the family members of those killed “face obstacle after obstacle” in seeking justice.
The testimony of a survivor of an extralegal killing, 29 year-old Efren Morillo, was also submitted to the record. Morillo is the lead petitioner before the Philippine Supreme Court in the first case against Operation Plan Tokhang.
Morillo described being at a friend’s house when five men and two women in civilian clothes arrived, armed with guns. They detained five members of the group and accused them of selling illegal drugs. Morillo recognized some of the men as police officers in civilian clothes. The armed men then shot the five civilians.
The Philippine bishops have been outspoken against the increase in killings, referring to it as a “reign of terror” in a Jan. 30 pastoral letter.
“If we neglect the drug addicts and pushers we have become part of the drug problem, if we consent or allow the killing of suspected drug addicts, we shall also be responsible for their deaths,” the bishops said.
“We cannot correct a wrong by doing another wrong,” they said. “A good purpose is not a justification for using evil means. It is good to remove the drug problem, but to kill in order to achieve this is also wrong.”
Duterte, however, responded to the letter by saying “You Catholics, if you believe in your priests and bishops, you stay with them,” while adding that “if you want to go to heaven, then go to them. Now, if you want to end drugs … I will go to hell, come join me.”
Duterte has also “openly threatened human rights defenders” and “attacked the media and lawyers who have represented the families of extrajudicial killings,” Carlos said on Tuesday.
Catholic priests have also offered their churches as “sanctuaries” for those who believe they are on the police hit lists, the Guardian reported in February.
[…]
Kim Davis talks of her religious objections to same sex marriage, being that same sex marriage is a violation of the sanctity of marriage. She has been divorced three times.
If I remember correctly that’s an option in the Orthodox Church. You get more than one try.
William’s comment was the standard slogan back in the day and it’s still a childish cheap shot. Just because I punched a guy in the nose doesn’t mean I’m disqualified from objecting to murder. He really should try for an original reaction some day if actual thought isn’t in his wheelhouse.
The reality, whether we like it or not, is that Luther (who diminished marriage to an affair of state in his project to truncate the list of sacraments) and Tudor (who despite lending his name to a likely ghost-written defense of the seven Sacraments, gave us an exhibit in ” all heresy begins below the belt”) are the authors both of Davis’ serial monogamy as well as what Anthony Esolen referred to as “pseudonogamy”.
Once the state was made the custodian of the institution, it was likely to do what governments have always attempted to do-establish dominion. While I doubt
that either man could have anticipated that it would ever have been so transmogrified-THEY ARE RESPONSIBLE for ceding marriage to the state, ignoring the injunction to render to God what is God’s.
Nor is Davis’ position completely indefensible. Generally left of center “law professor” (sorry, I’ll never see a JD on par with an MD or a PhD in Chemistry) Eugene Volokh stated maintained that “an employer must try to accommodate religious employees’ beliefs”.
An implied accusation of hypocrisy usually reveals a hypocritical refusal to understand the meaning of the word. Hypocrisy is not the failure to live with fidelity to one’s standards or values. We’re all weak, and everyone fails. Hypocrisy is the presumption of objective moral principles and exercising objective moral outrage as a basis for implicity faulting another for believing in objective moral principles and exercising objective moral outrage.
Could Kim Davis not have just resigned rather than betray her conscience? Or face getting slapped with these fines?
J.M.J.
While it is true that every divorce, invalidates the validity of the marriage contract, no State has the authority to coerce any person into participating in the affirmation of the engaging in of sexual acts that regardless of the actors or the actor’s desires, even if the actors are a man and woman united in marriage as husband and wife, deny the Sanctity of the marital act, which is Life-affirming and Life-sustaining, and can only be consummated by a man and woman who have both the ability and desire to exist in relationship as husband and wife. No State has the authority to coerce any person to render onto Caesar, what Has Always And Will Always Belong To God, “The Most Holy Undivided Trinity”.
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/treaty-of-paris
Our Inherent Unalienable Rights , which are grounded in the Sanctity and Dignity of Human Life from the moment we are Created and brought into being at the moment of our conception , are unalienable and cannot be relinquished even if we so desire because these Unalienable Rights are Endowed to us from God, The Most Holy Undivided (Blessed) Trinity, The Author Of Love, Of Life, And Of Marriage, not Caesar.
“The issue with claiming violation to religious freedom is that Davis “was not acting as a private citizen, exercising her right to … religion, she was acting as a public official,” said Thomas Jipping, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
The Constitution does not provide for the relinquishing of our inherent unalienable Right to Religious Liberty when we are serving as a public official. Our inherent unalienable Rights are endowed to us from God, with the capital G, not Caesar.
Hasson said: “It’s a scandal that 70% of self-described Catholics support so-called same-sex ‘marriage.’”
It is a scandal that those who were Baptized Catholic but no longer desire to fulfill their Baptismal Promises have yet to be Charitably Anathema for the sake of their Redemption, and The Salvation of Souls.
It’s a scandal that 70% of self-described Catholics support so-called same-sex ‘marriage.’”
Do they? Everybody knows what is referred to as “globohomo” has enlisted every institution as a coercive force in requiring the acceptance of non just SSM but the identification as gay.
If you want to work in any company of significance, you will have “diversity, equity and inclusion forcibly shoved down your gullet.
It’s easier to just go with enforced view.
Obergefell, a pet project of Anthony Kennedy, who began his efforts with Lawrence v. Texas by claiming that the prohibited acrs were “customary” among homosexually inclined people (and theft is customary amoung thiefs, so what”, wrote an opinion in Obergefell that was described by commenter and supporter Andrew Koppelman
“All of Kennedy’s worst traits — the ponderous self-importance, the leaps of logic, the worship of state power — were on display. For a decision this important, the Court should have been able to do better.”
Of course in a supreme ipse dixit Koppelman admitted these deficiencies and still claimed the decision was correct.
Now it’s a public franchise you WILL accept and celebrate (for an entire month, unlike military veterans that put their lives on the line who just get 11/11.).
“The issue with claiming violation to religious freedom is that Davis “was not acting as a private citizen, exercising her right to … religion, she was acting as a public official,” said Thomas Jipping, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
Where in the Constitution does it state that public officials must relinquish their Right to Religious Liberty?
I am surprised The Supreme Court did not respond, but I suppose the lack of response on their part in regards to the violation of both The First and Eighth Amendments Of The Constitution Of The United States Of America in this particular case may be due to the erroneous notion that Religious Liberty should be viewed as a States Right issue and is no longer a Human’s Right Issue, which I suppose one could argue is an error in both Substantive and Procedural Due Process Law.
Woe to us!
Once you deny The Sanctity of the marital act within The Sacrament Of Holy Matrimony, and claim that in order to be married it is no longer necessary for a man and woman to have both the ability and desire to exist in relationship as husband and wife, invalidating the validity of a valid marriage contract, any relationship can be declared a marriage, if one so desires and the State no longer can serve to protect and defend The Marital Contract of husband and wife, making their authority in the defense of the marital contract null and void.
Just a thought:
Perhaps a class action suit filed for the failure of a judge’s fiduciary duty in regards to protecting the marital contract by deliberately changing the marital contract through the removal of the necessary marital clause, so that in order to be married, it is no longer necessary for a man and woman to have both the desire and ability to exist in relationship as husband and wife, in essence promoting adultery while claiming to protect the marital contract, which would be more than just a contradiction in terms?
And how would this happen?
Do you not realize a major part of the campaign to legalize pseudonogamy was financed by lawyers, law firms and bar associations? They all understood that making a new class of legally recognized, inherently unstable unions would create a rich vein of revenue in prenups, legal separations, divorces, wills, estates and inter vivos trusts?
If you ask cui bono? Few profited as much as the Bar. They’ll do nothing to act against their own interest. I once had a Columbia trained lawyer tell me “the law is about equity, not justice”. Once that was explicitly stated, I got over any childish notions about how the law works.
Why all the fuss about same sex marriage? Most of us really don’t care.
William, it sounds like you do not care about affirming the inherent Dignity of those persons who engage in demeaning sexual acts that deny their inherent Dignity, or care about the fact that those who respect the inherent Dignity of every human person are being forced to promote the engaging in or affirmation of demeaning sexual acts that deny the inherent Dignity of all persons. How can anyone claim that marriage, which consists of a man and woman united in marriage as husband and wife discriminates against either a man or a woman because
in order to be married one must have both the ability and desire to exist in relationship as husband and wife, and thus be married to each other.
Re Mrs. Cracker above (9:34 a.m.)
Resigning is a less-than-ideal “solution” to a conflict of conscience like that faced by Kim Davis.
That would pave the way for the forced removal of medical professionals who oppose abortion and euthanasia, for example.
(OTOH, if you make sure certain people aren’t hired for sensitive positions in the first place, you won’t have to worry about them quitting on you.)