MANILA: Philippine Vice President Leni Robredo said on Wednesday the nation’s drug war had left Filipinos feeling “hopeless and helpless,” with trust in the police eroded by thousands of summary executions.
In a video message to a UN meeting on extrajudicial killings posted online, Robredo also called for international scrutiny on President Rodrigo Duterte’s controversial crackdown.
“Some of those who have told us that when there’s crime, they normally go to the police. Now, they don’t know where to turn,” Robredo said in the message, which was released to press ahead of its screening at the UN meeting in Austria on Thursday.
“Our people feel both hopeless and helpless: A state of mind that we must all take seriously.”
Duterte won presidential elections last year after promising to eradicate illegal drugs in society with an unprecedented crackdown in which tens of thousands of people would die. But the vice president is elected separately in the Philippines, and Robredo belongs to a rival political party.
Since Duterte took office at the end of June, police have reported killing 2,500 people in anti-drug operations while about 4,500 others have died in unexplained circumstances. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have warned Duterte may be overseeing crimes against humanity, with state sanctioned killings.
Duterte and his police chiefs have insisted security forces are not breaking any laws.
They have said nearly all of those killed by police were in self-defense while the unexplained deaths were likely due to drug gangs eliminating rivals or others who could implicate them.
In her message to the UN, Robredo described all those deaths as “summary executions.”
“We are now looking at some very grim statistics: Since July last year, more than 7,000 people have been killed in summary executions,” Robredo said.
Robredo also said police were detaining innocent people in a scheme known as “exchange heads.”
In this, if police officers could not find a drug suspect, they would detain one of his or her relatives instead, according to Robredo.
While Duterte has repeatedly railed against international human rights groups and other foreign critics of his drug war, Robredo invited more scrutiny.
“To know that the international community’s eyes are on us and to feel that human rights advocates are watching over our country gives us comfort, courage, and hope,” she said.
Robredo’s relationship with Duterte is frosty and since being disinvited from his Cabinet meetings, they meet rarely and only during public events.
She belongs to another political party and was not Duterte’s choice for vice president, who is elected in a separate contest. A social activist and lawyer, Robredo said the public should demand greater transparency about the drugs war and questioned Duterte’s figures on drug use.
Duterte sacked Robredo from his Cabinet in December after she started speaking out against his drug war and some of his other policies. Her comments to the UN meeting are among her strongest criticisms of Duterte.The vice president of the Philippines has issued a strong rebuke of President Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody war on drugs, describing it in a video sent to the United Nations as an issue of public health that cannot be solved “with bullets alone”.
More than 8,000 people have died since Duterte began his war on drugs when he took office on June 30. More than 2,500 were killed in police operations during which officers said they fired in self-defence.
Human rights groups say thousands of other deaths of drug users and peddlers are extrajudicial killings, probably ordered by police. Police strongly reject that.
In a message to be shown on Thursday at the annual meeting of the U.N. Commission on Drugs in Geneva, Leni Robredo challenged Duterte’s crackdown, describing the killings as “summary executions”. Filipinos were “hopeless and helpless”, she added.
“The body count due to the drug-related killings keeps growing,” Robredo said in the video statement uploaded on YouTube.
“We are now looking at some very grim statistics: since July last year, more than 7,000 people have been killed in summary executions. Our people need nothing less than a safe environment.”
The government has made no immediate comment on the video.
Robredo has emerged as one of a few high-profile Filipinos willing to speak out against the war on drugs.
Many of its domestic critics have been ridiculed and are routinely discredited by Duterte and his aides, some subject to fierce barbs from the president’s huge online support base. Duterte himself has vowed to humiliate foreign leaders who challenge him over the campaign.
Duterte has recently described 4 million Filipinos as “slaves” to drugs.
“Our leaders must be honest about the basis of the drug war and what exactly is the scope of the drug problem,” she said, adding that the problem was linked with poverty and inequality.
Robredo detailed a litany of alleged human rights abuses during the crackdown on what she said were predominantly poor communities.
“People are told they do not have any right to demand search warrants as they are squatters,” she said in the video.
Robredo accused police of using a tactic of detaining the loved ones of drug suspects if they cannot find their targets.
Police spokesman Dionardo Carlos rebutted that contention during a television interview on Wednesday.
Philippine VP slams drug war
Philippine VP slams drug war
Trump takes unconventional approach to communicating to the public about war in Iran
- The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war
Typical of an unconventional presidency, the Trump administration waited more than 48 hours to make any live, public communication to the American people about why it had decided to go to war with Iran.
President Donald Trump discussed why he launched the attack prior to a White House ceremony honoring military heroes on Monday but took no questions from reporters. Earlier in the day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine briefed journalists at the Pentagon.
The two days previous, Trump delivered two pretaped statements that were released on Truth Social, the social media site owned by the president’s media company, and granted telephone interviews to more than a dozen journalists — several of which produced fragmented responses that, to some, clouded as much as they cleared up.
The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war, even as the American military suffered its first casualties. By contrast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has teamed with the US against Iran, delivered two statements the day the war began and addressed reporters Monday at the site of a missile attack that killed nine people. The Israeli military has held multiple press briefings each day.
“The American people need a commander in chief, and he has been absent in that role,” Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama, said on CNN Monday. Emanuel, a Democrat, is contemplating a run for the presidency in 2028.
An unconventional strategy leads to criticism
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, wrote on social media that “after Trump launched a new war on Iran, he did not rush back to the White House to make an Oval Office address to rally the nation as other presidents have done. He stayed at Mar-a-Lago to attend a glitzy political fundraiser.”
That post provoked a response from Steven Cheung, White House communications director. “Imagine being a reporter so consumed with Trump Derangement Syndrome that he wants President Trump to mimic the failed policies of the past. The truth is that President Trump spent the majority of his time monitoring the situation in a secure facility, in constant contact with world leaders, and made multiple addresses to the nation that garnered hundreds of millions of views. He also took dozens of calls with reporters.”
The calls included one with Baker’s colleague at The Times, Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Trump’s mobile phone number is known to many of the reporters who cover him, and the president often takes their calls for on-the-spot interviews. Besides The Times, he spoke in the aftermath of the attack to journalists for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Axios, Politico and an Israeli television station.
Most of the calls were brief and marginally illuminating; Politico’s Dasha Burns said Trump answered but said he was too busy to talk. The public couldn’t hear what Trump said in the interviews and was dependent upon what the journalists chose to report on the conversations.
“I spoke to President Trump today and he told me that the operation in Iran is going to go very fast,” Libby Alon, a reporter for Channel 14 News in Israel, wrote about her interview on X. “It’s doing very well, and (will) make the people of Israel very happy, and the people of the world very happy.”
The Times reported that in its six-minute chat, Trump “offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how power might be transferred to a new government — or even whether the existing Iranian power structure would run that government or be overthrown.”
In one of his two conversations with Trump, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl said when he asked about the death of Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the president said: “I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well I got him first.” CNN’s Jake Tapper went on the air minutes after his conversation Monday, saying Trump told him “the big one is coming soon,” an apparent reference to a future attack.
Asked for comment, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said: “President Trump is the most transparent and accessible president in American history. The American people have never had a more direct and authentic relationship with a president of the United States than they have with President Trump.”
Hegseth briefing concentrates on friendly reporters
Pentagon reporters learned late Sunday about Hegseth’s briefing. Reporters from The Associated Press, Reuters, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and Stars & Stripes were permitted into the briefing room, but Hegseth did not call on them. Instead, he took questions from NewsNation and Trump-friendly outlets like the Daily Caller, Daily Wire, One America News and the Christian Broadcasting Network. Most mainstream news outlets left their regular stations at the Pentagon last fall rather than agree to Hegseth’s rules restricting their work.
Hegseth denounced the “foolishness” of people wanting to know details of the operation in advance, such as whether Americans would commit to more than air power, and said the operation would continue as long as it took to achieve objections. He initially ignored NBC News’ Courtney Kube when she called out a question: “President Trump put a four-week time limit on it. Are you saying he’s wrong?”
Later, Hegseth denounced Kube for asking “the typical NBC sort of gotcha-type question. President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it might take — four weeks, two weeks, six weeks, it could move up, it could move back. We’re going to execute at his command the objectives he set out to achieve.”
Unlike Pentagon briefings in past administrations, reporters were given assigned seats, with the Trump-friendly outlets seated in front. Jennifer Griffin, Hegseth’s former colleague at Fox News Channel who left the Pentagon with other reporters after not accepting his new rules, was seated in the last row.
