MANILA, Philippines — The five United States senators who called on the Philippine government to free Sen. Leila De Lima and drop charges against Rappler CEO Maria Ressa should stop meddling with the country’s affairs, Malacañang said Monday.
The lawmakers filed a six-page resolution last week, highlighting human rights concerns in the Philippines and urging the Duterte administration to respect freedom of expression.
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“The Philippines is a close ally but this bipartisan resolution makes it clear that the US Congress seeks an immediate improvement in the government’s behavior and the end of efforts to weaponize the rule of law against brave individuals like Sen. Leila De Lima and Maria Ressa,” the senators said.
The resolution of the US senators irked presidential spokesperson Salvador Panelo, who urged the lawmakers to “mind their own business” as “their country has enough problems and they should focus on them.”
“Their resolution is an unwelcome intrusion to our country’s domestic legal processes and an outrageous interference with our nation’s sovereignty as the subject cases are now being heard by our local courts,” Panelo said.
He added: “No government official of any country has the authority or right to dictate on how we address the commission of crimes.”
The president’s mouthpiece also said that the US senators’ resort to a “reckless and unstudied political exercise” showed their unfamiliarity of the country’s domestic affairs and their disrespect to the clamor of Filipinos for law and order.
‘No one is above the law’
“As regards Sen. De Lima and Ms. Ressa, their cases have passed through administrative and judicial processes before their respective warrants of arrest have been issued by courts,” Panelo said.
The president’s spokesman alleged that De Lima is a “prisoner of no conscience or a prisoner of her own folly” and Ressa is a “high-profile journalist who is obsessed with hiding behind the mantle of the freedom of speech but who is criminally charged due to her commission of illegal acts.”
A staunch critic of the Duterte administration and its ferocious anti-narcotics campaign, De Lima was arrested on Feb. 24, 2017 on what she called “trumped-up” charges that she said were part of the president’s vendetta.
After being re-arrested in February on different charges and then freed on bail, veteran journalist Ressa was rearrested in March on charges that she and her colleagues at online news site Rappler violated rules on foreign ownership of media.
“Their association with the political opposition is no exempting circumstance to shield them from criminal prosecution. In this country, no one is above the law,” Panelo said.
‘EJKs not state-sponsored’
Panelo once again said that extrajudicial killings are not state-sponsored but rather consequences of members of drug syndicates killing each other or law enforcers defending themselves.
“As to the issue of EJKs, such has been repeatedly addressed as either a consequence of law enforcement agencies defending themselves from the lethal violence unleashed by those subject of legitimate police operations or a result of members of the prohibited drug industry killing each other because of rivalry, botched deals, swindling or for their pre-emptive protection measures,” he said.
Extrajudicial killings remain the chief human rights concern in the Philippines and these continued in 2018 with an average of six persons killed daily in anti-drug operations, according to the latest annual report of the US State Department on human rights practices.
Data from the government showed that more than 5,100 drug personalities had died in anti-drug operations since Duterte took office. The figure does not include deaths that the government has attributed to vigilantes and supposed feuds among drug groups.
But human rights groups have higher estimates—more than 20,000 killed, mostly those living in urban poor communities.
Panelo noted that the order to file murder charges against a Manila police officer involved in the killing of epileptic Djastin Lopez in a false drug raid and the conviction of three Caloocan cops for the killing of Kian Loyd Delos Santos show that the current administration “does not tolerate abusive police officers.”