DRUG WAR | Human rights group urges Marcos to end drug war as bodies continue to pile up

January 12, 2023 , 06:35 PM

By Clarist Zablan

(January 12, 2023) – A New York-based human rights group on Thursday urged the Philippines to end the brutal and bloody war on drugs, raising grave concerns as bodies continue to pile up even under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr’s government.

Phil Robertson of Human Rights Watch (HRW) said the killings have continued even after former President Rodrigo Duterte had left office. It called on Marcos to make good his promise to shift the anti-drug efforts to rehabilitation of drug users.

“President Marcos keeps telling foreign leaders that he’s ready to improve the human rights situation in the Philippines, but this is not going to happen so long as the police kill suspected drug users with impunity,” Robertson said in a statement.

“Marcos has a golden opportunity to prove that he is serious about human rights by ordering the end of the ‘drug war.’”

Around 175 drug-related killings have been reported since Marcos took office as of the end of 2022, based on tallies of the University of the Philippines Third World Studies Center under its initiative “Dahas.” This surpassed the number of drug war killings tallied during the last six months of the Duterte administration.

In Duterte’s first six months, 3,000 suspected street-level drug peddlers, couriers and users were killed in what police said as self-defense when the suspects resisted arrest and tried to fight back.

In the first week of January, Dahas reported four drug-related killings were recorded.

Duterte’s iron-fisted rule saw a widespread crackdown on suspected drug offenders that led to the killing of at least 6,000 in anti-drug raids, based on police data. But rights groups estimate the killings at as high as 30,000.

The former president’s bloody and brutal drug war policy has prompted the pre-trial chamber of the International Criminal Court to open investigations into the drug war killings in 2021. This was paused upon request of the Philippine government, but the ICC prosecutor has requested for its resumption last year.

Marcos has made pronouncements committing to continuing the government’s war on illegal drugs, but he vowed to take a different approach from before that does not focus just on law enforcement but also on prevention such as in education and rehabilitation.

“We have seen that the drug war has been conducted purely on the enforcement side. I think that we should also focus on prevention, and on the educational process where we teach young children that doing drugs is bad,” the president told CNN Philippines last October.

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