On SOJ’s statement at HRC46

Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra in his speech before the 46th session of the UN Human Rights Council missed a very important point regarding “working domestic accountability mechanisms” in the Philippines — that the killings continue.

What’s worse is that the domestic mechanisms have allowed such to continue with impunity, with such appalling injustice, that more than four years after, we are still counting the bodies, we are still looking at numerous perpetrators in uniform unpunished, and we still hear the President and his henchmen justify the murder spree. Indeed, there is no amount of window-dressing even at the UN that can hide these indisputable facts.

If at all, the initial findings of the drug war panel as cited by Sec. Guevarra have only made the call to stop the killings and the policy on the drug war even more imperative. Such findings only prove that an independent probe is even more important, at a time that the human rights situation has gone into a steep descent to a full-blown crisis under an authoritarian regime.