Palace: UN rights council resolution maliciously partisan, designed to embarrass PHL

Malacañang on Friday slammed the United Nations Human Rights Council resolution seeking an investigation on President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs, saying it was an affront to the country’s sovereignty and designed to embarrass the Philippines before the international community.

Presidential spokesperson Salvador Panelo said the government objects and condemns the Iceland-led resolution backed by 17 other countries during the 41st session of the UNHRC in Geneva, “the same being based on false information and unverified facts and figures.”

“The resolution is grotesquely one-sided, outrageously narrow, and maliciously partisan. It reeks of nauseating politics completely devoid of respect for the sovereignty of our country, even as it is bereft of the gruesome realities of the drug menace in the country,” he said.

“Evidently, the resolution was designed to embarrass the Philippines before the international community and the global audience.”

Panelo said the resolution was “offensive” and “insulting” to the majority of Filipinos who support Duterte’s “unique” leadership style.

Like Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr., Panelo also questioned the propriety and validity of the resolution.

The Palace official said not only it was not unanimously adopted, but it did not even get a simple majority of the 47 member countries of the UNHRC, of which the Philippines is a member.

“The voting is not decisive in its favor. Only 18 countries out of the 47 member-countries voted for the resolution. A simple majority would have been 24. This means that majority of the members are not really convinced of the resolution calling for the investigation of the so-called extrajudicial killings in our country,” he said.

“The other 17 countries of the resolution certainly have been misled by Iceland, which in turn was led astray by the continuing and relentless false news, published by a few biased media in the country and elsewhere.”

Panelo said the resolution only showed how the Western powers are “scornful of our sovereign exercise of protecting our people from the scourge of prohibited drugs that threaten to destroy the fabric of our society.”

“Their intrusive abuse is patent and condemnable. It smacks of politicization designed to force our free state to be subservient to their imagined superiority,” he said.                                                                 

He said the Duterte presidency is “not cowed or weakened” by the resolution, adding the President “will be unyielding in his constitutional duty to serve the general welfare of the citizenry, protect the Filipino people from the peril spawned by illegal drugs, and to fiercely preserve the Republic from the enemies of the state.”

Philippine authorities said that more than 6,000 drug personalities had been killed in police operations around the country since Duterte assumed office in 2016, but local and international human rights groups said the figures could be higher.

The Palace earlier said the drug-related deaths were consequences of police operations when the suspects violently resist arrest that endangers the lives of the law enforcers who act on self-defense.

It urged the families of those who might felt there were violations during police operations to file cases instead of seeking help from detractors of the administration who are allegedly known to only politicize their situations.

Duterte on Thursday vowed to study whether to allow UN personnel to the Philippines to investigate the deaths linked to his campaign against illegal drugs.

The President said he will review the intent of the proposed investigation and will then decide on whether to permit the same to proceed or not.

“Should it proceed impartially, we are certain that its result will only lead to the humiliation of the investigators, as well as of Iceland and the 17 other nations supporting it, since there never have been - nor will there ever be - state-sponsored killings in this part of the world,” Panelo said. — BAP, GMA News