MANILA: Filipino lawyers on Thursday announced a broad alliance to challenge President Rodrigo Duterte’s 16-month war on drugs amid unprecedented scrutiny of the campaign in which more than 3,900 mostly urban, poor Filipinos have been killed.
Police say the deaths were in self-defense after armed suspects resisted arrest. Critics dispute that and say executions are taking place, with zero accountability.
Lawyers Against Extrajudicial Killings adds to a growing number of voices calling on the government to end the campaign.
“It is the duty of all lawyers to consistently, uncompromisingly uphold and defend human rights,” said Edre Olalia, head of the National Union of People’s Lawyers and one of the group’s organizers.
Duterte’s spokesman, Harry Roque, a congressman and human rights lawyer, denied rights violations on the part of the president but welcomed the new group.
“Unless we can come up with actual evidence that there are extra-legal killings, then we cannot overcome the presumption (of regularity in the discharge of official functions),” Roque said.
“He (Duterte) will not tolerate murders. He will only tolerate killings when it is in line with duty and when the engagement is legal,” Roque, who had prosecuted on behalf of murdered journalists, told reporters.
Filipino lawyers’ group challenges Duterte’s war on drugs
Filipino lawyers’ group challenges Duterte’s war on drugs
Italian general challenges Meloni from the right
- A career soldier with experience in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, Vannacci shot to fame in 2023 with the publication of a controversial book, “The World Upside Down”
- Meloni’s party remains the most popular, polling at more than 29 percent support — more than it won in 2022 elections
ROME: A retired general who criticizes the EU, wants to send home illegal migrants and says Ukraine should accept a peace deal with Russia is challenging Italy’s hard-right government on its own turf.
Roberto Vannacci, 57, last month defected from the far-right League party, a partner in Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s coalition government, and set up a new party he said is “proud of being right-wing.”
Opinion polls put the new “National Future” at around three percent support, most of it taken from the League, led by Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, but also Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy.
Meloni’s party remains the most popular, polling at more than 29 percent support — more than it won in 2022 elections.
But the general offers “the first movement emerging on the right that isn’t aligned with the three main parties,” Lorenzo Castellani, professor of politics at Rome’s Luiss University, said.
A career soldier with experience in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, Vannacci shot to fame in 2023 with the publication of a controversial book, “The World Upside Down.”
In it, he complained about a “dictatorship of minorities,” while saying Italian star volleyball player Paola Egonu, who is black, had features that “do not represent Italian-ness.”
He was suspended from his army job, with Defense Minister Guido Crosetto — a member of Meloni’s party — saying that his “personal ramblings ... discredit the army, the Defense Ministry and the constitution.”
But in the end, he was allowed to retire, and the controversy made him a celebrity on the far right.
Salvini, whose anti-immigration League has been losing ground to Meloni’s in recent years, invited him into his party and Vannacci was elected to the European Parliament in 2024.
But last month the ex-general struck out on his own, taking with him two League MPs and another who was independent but formerly in Meloni’s party.
He is targeting voters disenchanted with Salvini and also Meloni, who has radical far-right roots but in office has taken a more pragmatic approach.
National Future is “a party of the true right, pure, sincere, proud, unashamed of being right-wing,” and “not hesitant, not fearful,” Vannacci told the foreign press association Thursday.
Once a firebrand euroskeptic, Meloni has worked closely with the EU in office, while her flagship promise to cut illegal immigration has been tempered by a major boost in visas for legal migrants.
Vannacci has “a more extremist approach to issues like immigration, like security, where he explicitly talks about remigration,” Castellani said.
The ex-general highlights Italy’s Roman-Christian roots and has called for migrants to be returned to their countries of origin if they arrived illegally or committed a crime.
While Meloni has distanced herself from Italy’s Fascist past, Vannacci was accused of revisionism last year after a social media post defending the democratic credentials of dictator Benito Mussolini.
National sovereignty, meanwhile, is a priority, with Vannacci lambasting the EU as both overreaching member states’ rights and globally ineffective — not least in the current wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.
