MANILA – The head of the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) sounded the alarm over the increase in the number of “summary execution” cases involving suspected criminals, especially in Metro Manila and other urban centers in the country.
Lawyer Leila de Lima, the CHR chairman, urged concerned agencies, particularly the Philippine National Police (PNP) and the Department of Justice to end these killings, believed to have been perpetrated by “vigilantes” allegedly working with the tacit signal from lawmen.
Such killings are also known in police parlance as “salvaging” in which most of the victims are suspected criminals.
De Lima expressed her deep concern over these killings in the wake of the spate of the discovery of the bodies of victims of summary executions in Metro Manila.
The victims, she said, were found dumped in secluded places in the metropolis and attached to them are placards written in the Filipino language which bore the message: “Don’t imitate me. I am a robber.”
De Lima also cited reports from the CHR regional office as well as human rights groups in Davao City in Mindanao where about 20 unsolved cases of summary executions had allegedly occurred in the month of January alone.
The killings were said to have been perpetrated by the so-called “Davao Death Squad” which targets suspected criminal elements like drug pushers, thieves, holdup men and robbers.
As in Metro Manila, the killings in Davao were reportedly the handiwork of vigilante groups with links to the police, human rights advocates claimed.
Significantly, the increase in such killings has reached alarming proportions as the Philippines, like other nations in the world, is now experiencing the adverse impact of the global financial and economic crunch.
Bur De Lima emphasized there is no reason to take anyone’s life through the so-called “street justice” except in self-defense or armed conflict.
“Since the State itself is prohibited from taking life, more so are private citizens from carrying out the same,” the outspoken CHR chief pointed out.
She did not elaborate, but she was apparently referring to the abolition by the Arroyo administration of the death penalty and its replacement by life imprisonment, for heinous crimes like plunder, dealing in illegal drugs, murder, rape and robbery with homicide.
De Lima also stressed that the right to life and due process are firmly enshrined in the 1987 Constitution and other laws which are applicable to all Filipinos.
Thus, when the use of extra legal means for revenge or retribution becomes rampant and widespread, all citizens are placed in the grave danger of being denied their own rights to life and due process, she said.
De Lima said that preservation of the right to life and due process is a way of protecting the integrity of the rule of law in country as she emphasized:
“We cannot hope to provide the innocent and the upstanding with the protections of the law if we do not provide the same protections to miscreants and criminals.”
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