Malacañang on Friday rejected a call by some members of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to probe the growing number of killings in President Duterte’s war on drugs, saying it was interfering in the country’s sovereignty. Iceland on Thursday submitted a draft resolution, backed by mainly European states, formally calling for a UN investigation of the thousands of killings in the drug war. The Duterte administration has insisted that the more than 6,500 suspected drug dealers and users killed by police in antinarcotics operations had all put up a fight. ‘Unreliable’ police accounts“Police accounts of drug raids are not reliable and the officers enforcing the ‘drug war’ have been shown to plant weapons and drugs to justify the killings,” Laila Matar of Human Rights Watch told the UNHRC this week. During the same meeting, then Foreign Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano delivered a speech attacking Callamard for supposedly prejudging the President and human rights groups for spreading misinformation.

Source: Philippine Daily Inquirer July 05, 2019 21:11 UTC