{"id":10460,"date":"2024-12-16T00:05:16","date_gmt":"2024-12-15T23:05:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/amp.ngo\/?p=10460"},"modified":"2024-12-13T12:46:26","modified_gmt":"2024-12-13T11:46:26","slug":"police-hampers-investigations-of-the-commission-on-human-rights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amp.ngo\/en\/police-hampers-investigations-of-the-commission-on-human-rights\/","title":{"rendered":"Police hampers investigations of Commission on Human Rights"},"content":{"rendered":"

During a Senate hearing on October 28, 2024, the Chairperson of the Philippine Commission on Human Rights (CHR), Richard Palpal-latoc, reported<\/a> that the Philippine National Police (PNP) often refuses to cooperate with the CHR. The lack of access<\/a> to police reports, especially in drug-related and extrajudicial killing cases, makes the CHR’s investigative work considerably more difficult.<\/p>\n

The Duterte Information Act<\/a> (Executive Order No. 2\/EO2) of July 23, 2016, requires all executive branch agencies to be transparent and release documents and information to the public. According to Palpal-latoc, a list<\/a> of exemptions (Memorandum Circular No. 15) to the EO2, dated March 17, 2023, prevents<\/a> the CHR from accessing relevant PNP documents for their investigations. In addition, the police used a PNP memorandum dated July 28, 2017, to refuse CHR requests to produce documents. This approach impedes<\/a> the CHR’s investigations into cases of human rights violations committed by government officials in the so-called \u201cwar on drugs.\u201d<\/p>\n

In that context, the Secretary of the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG), Juanito Remulla, described<\/a> the PNP as a \u201cpolitical organization\u201d and urged reforms within the institution. The Senate investigation into human rights violations committed in the context of Ex-President Duterte’s \u201cwar on drugs\u201d brought<\/a> to light, among other things, a reward system for police officers, which is now being incorporated into the CHR’s investigations. To this end, a special task force was<\/a> set up in the CHR to examine the statements from the hearings in the Senate and House of Representatives on human rights violations in the \u201cwar on drugs\u201d under Ex-President Duterte.<\/p>\n

The problem of restricted access to police documents was already highlighted in a CHR report<\/a> from 2022. This report emphasized<\/a> that drug-related killings are often incompletely and incorrectly documented. Human Rights Watch (HRW) criticized<\/a>: \u201cThe police [\u2026] have proven that they cannot investigate themselves. Their internal processes are not only inadequate \u2014 they are defective and fundamentally flawed.\u201d HRW also called for the establishment of an independent institution to tackle human rights problems, as the PNP was not in a position to do so. The CHR was highlighted as a relevant institution in this context.<\/p>\n

According to data<\/a> from the \u201cDrug Archive Philippines\u201d of the Ateneo de Manila University, almost 50 percent of the victims in the \u201cwar on drugs\u201d between May 10, 2016, and September 29, 2017, were not high-ranking drug criminals, but minor suspects in the drug business. In addition<\/a>, 80 percent of the victims come from the poorer strata of the population. The current documentation of the Dahas Project of the University of the Philippines shows<\/a> that drug-related killings continue to take place with 347 cases between January and November 2024. Cebu is<\/a> a hotspot region; most of the killings carried out by state security forces took<\/a> place in the Davao del Sur region.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Photo \u00a9 Raffy Lerma<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During a Senate hearing on October 28, 2024, the Chairperson of the Philippine Commission on Human Rights (CHR), Richard Palpal-latoc, reported that the Philippine National Police (PNP) often refuses to cooperate with the CHR. The lack of access to police reports, especially in drug-related and extrajudicial killing cases, makes the CHR’s investigative work considerably more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":6748,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[64,73,58,59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-war-on-drugs-en","category-aktuelles-en","category-human-rights-news","category-internal-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amp.ngo\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amp.ngo\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amp.ngo\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amp.ngo\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amp.ngo\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10460"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/amp.ngo\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10516,"href":"https:\/\/amp.ngo\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10460\/revisions\/10516"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amp.ngo\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amp.ngo\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amp.ngo\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amp.ngo\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}