Palace: Duterte presidency ‘not cowed or weakened’ by UN resolution on drug war

MALACAÑANG on Friday slammed the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) resolution seeking an investigation on the war on illegal drugs in the Philippines, saying President Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency is “not cowed or weakened” by such international review.

In a statement, Palace spokesman Salvador Panelo said the Philippine government “objects and condemns” the Iceland-led resolution backed by 17 other countries during the 41st session of the UNHRC in Geneva, “the same being based on false information and unverified facts and figures.”

“The Duterte presidency is not cowed or weakened by such resolution. This Administration remains unwavering and unstoppable in its continuing campaign to provide a safe environment for every Filipino,” Panelo said.

“The Chief Executive will be unyielding in his constitutional duty to serve the general welfare of the citizenry, protect the Filipino people from the peril spawned by illegal drugs, and to fiercely preserve the Republic from the enemies of the state,” he added.

Panelo said the resolution was an affront to the country’s sovereignty and “designed to embarrass the Philippines before the international community and the global audience.”

“The resolution is grotesquely one-sided, outrageously narrow, and maliciously partisan. It reeks of nauseating politics completely devoid of respect for the sovereignty of our country, even as it is bereft of the gruesome realities of the drug menace in the country,” Panelo said.

“The Philippines is a sovereign state, undeserving of any intrusion by any country, under whatever disguised lofty principle it advances. Any attempt to undermine our sovereignty will receive an uproarious rejection from our countrymen, it being a naked affront to their authority to run their domestic affairs they deem fit under the prevailing circumstances,” he added.

Like Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr., Panelo also questioned the propriety and validity of the resolution.

He stressed that the resolution not only was not unanimously adopted, but it did not even get a simple majority of the 47 member countries of the UNHRC, of which the Philippines is a member.

“The voting is not decisive in its favor. Only 18 countries out of the 47 member-countries voted for the resolution. A simple majority would have been 24. This means that majority of the members are not really convinced of the resolution calling for the investigation of the so-called extrajudicial killings in our country,” he said.

“The other 17 countries of the resolution certainly have been misled by Iceland, which in turn was led astray by the continuing and relentless false news, published by a few biased media in the country and elsewhere,” he said.

The Palace official also said that the resolution only showed how the Western powers were “scornful of our sovereign exercise of protecting our people from the scourge of prohibited drugs that threaten to destroy the fabric of our society.”

“Their intrusive abuse is patent and condemnable. It smacks of politicization designed to force our free state to be subservient to their imagined superiority,” Panelo said.

Panelo, who is also Duterte’s top legal counsel, described the resolution as “offensive and insulting to the sensibilities of the 81 percent of the Filipino people who expressed satisfaction on the kind of forceful and effective governance that PRRD (Duterte) has given them.”

“The consistent results of periodic independent surveys, showing the unprecedented support given to the unique style of leadership of this President, are a repudiation of those who disagree or question his methodology in dismantling the apparatus of the drug syndicate,” Panelo said.

“The overwhelming majority of the Filipino electorate, who mercilessly crushed the intellectual and nationalist pretensions of those who peddled the bogus news, untruthful accounts and vicious propaganda on the President’s campaign against illegal drugs, are grossly and thoroughly insulted by the resolution that echoes such falsities,” he added.

On Thursday, Duterte vowed to study whether to allow UN personnel to the Philippines to investigate the deaths linked to his campaign against illegal drugs.

The President will review the intent of the proposed investigation and will then decide on whether to permit the same to proceed or not, according to Panelo.

“Should it proceed impartially, we are certain that its result will only lead to the humiliation of the investigators, as well as of Iceland and the 17 other nations supporting it, since there never have been – nor will there ever be – state-sponsored killings in this part of the world,” he said.

Duterte has overseen a narcotics crackdown in which police have killed more than 6,000 suspected drug offenders since he was elected three years ago.

Rights groups, however, say the actual number of dead is at least three times higher. CATHERINE S. VALENTE