De Lima: Duterte must be jailed for drug killings
Former Sen. Leila de Lima maintained on Monday that former President Rodrigo Duterte should be imprisoned for his crimes against humanity as the “instigator and inducer” of killings during his antidrug campaign.
Appearing as a resource person before the House human rights panel, which is looking into extrajudicial killings (EJKs) that happened during Duterte’s drug war, De Lima said she was inclined to believe it might be better to wait for the findings of the International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor (ICC-OTP) on the possible culpability of the former chief executive and his men, including then national police chief and now Sen. Ronald dela Rosa.
“These killings constitute a systematic attack on civilians and [are] considered as a crime against humanity under International Humanitarian Law,” she said. “For [Duterte’s] crimes against humanity, both as Davao City mayor and Philippine President, [he] should be prosecuted and convicted by the ICC and spend the remainder of his life in prison.”
She pointed out that any investigation of the drug war “necessarily has to go back to the origins and history of the Davao Death Squad (DDS) from its inception in 1998 up to 2016.”
Mere offshoot
“This is because the 2016 to 2022 drug war is a mere offshoot of the DDS experience in Davao,” she said, alleging that systematic EJKs in Davao City from 1998 to 2016 were “simply replicated at the national level when Duterte assumed the presidency.”
Before she became a senator, De Lima investigated killings allegedly perpetrated by the DDS in Davao City as head of the Commission on Human Rights.
As senator, she launched an investigation into EJKs, resulting in the filing of drug charges against her for supposedly incurring Duterte’s ire. She was eventually cleared of all charges after being imprisoned for six years.
DDS model
“The centerpiece of the national drug war was modeled after the DDS system of operations involving active (Philippine National Police) personnel in vigilante killings,” she said.
According to her, policemen from Davao were reassigned to Metro Manila and other urban hubs to organize “local DDS chapters in every city for purposes of carrying out the systematic identification of targets and their summary execution either in ‘nanlaban (resisting) ops’ or by riding-in-tandem vigilantes.”
De Lima lamented that compared to the ICC investigation on the drug war killings, the Department of Justice has “barely scratched the surface,” pointing out that the agency has investigated only 52 out of the thousands of EJK cases.
“That’s why you cannot blame me if I say that we are actually better off waiting for the result of the ICC-OTP’s investigation, which is light years ahead of our local investigation at least as regards the accountability of the high ranking officials,” she said.
