MALACAÑANG on Saturday, June 8, blasted around 11 human rights experts for believing in the “false” information about the Philippines’s current situation being propagated by President Rodrigo Duterte’s critics.
This comes a day after human rights experts called on the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council to launch an independent investigation on the supposed human rights violations in the Philippines
In a statement, Presidential Spokesperson Salvador Panelo said the call to probe the Philippines was “intellectually challenged,” stressing that the allegations of human rights abuses had already been “discredited and repudiated” by Filipinos.
“The latest call by 11 Special Rapporteurs of the United Nations (UN) for an international probe of the Philippines not only is intellectually challenged but an outrageous interference on Philippine sovereignty,” the Palace official said in a statement.
“The reasons foisted by them for the aforesaid investigation have been discredited and repudiated by the very nation they pretend to care about,” he added.
In a statement posted on the website of 47-man UN Human Rights Council, the 11 human rights experts stressed the need to initiate a probe against the Philippines, as it claimed that there were only a “few independent and effective investigations” conducted by the Duterte government to address the alleged violations of human rights in the country.
Those who issued the call were UN special rapporteurs Agnes Callamard, Hilal Elver, Michel Forst, David Kaye, Clément Nyaletsossi Voulé, José Antonio Guevara Bermúdez, Dainius P?ras, Victoria Lucia Tauli-Corpuz, Dubravka Šimonovic, and Diego García-Sayán; and Meskerem Geset Techane, chair of UN working group on the issue of discrimination against women in law and in practice.
They said they “extremely concerned” over the rising number of unlawful deaths in the country, and the supposed attacks against judiciary’s independence, and alleged threat to freedom of expression, among others.
“Given the scale and seriousness of the reported human rights violations, we call on the Human Rights Council to establish an investigation into the human rights violations in the Philippines,” they said in a joint statement.
Panelo slammed the UN envoys for “peddling a biased and absolutely false recital of facts, adulterated with malicious imputations against the constituted authorities, smacks of unpardonable intrusions on our sovereignty.”
He belied their accusations, saying that the Philippines has a “working vibrant democracy in this part of the world.”
“It has demonstrated strength and resilience in exercising the democratic rights outlined by the Constitution through the various institutions, with their respective allocation of power, geared toward the promotion of general welfare,” he said.
“Let the enemies of the state and their supporters from foreign soil be forewarned that no amount of destructive narratives against this government will envelope it with the appearance of pretended truth to hoodwink the Filipino people in embracing it,” Panelo added.
Panelo also emphasized that what the UN special rapporteurs had presented are “general allegations culled from false information emanating from the purveyors of status quo ante the Duterte presidency.”
He also noted that based on surveys, the Filipino people are not swayed by the anti-Duterte’s strong opposition to the government’s policies and programs, such as the campaign against illegal drugs.
“Lest these foreign propagandists, masquerading as human right protectors, forget, allegations are not proof,” he said.
“One or two of them have tried this tact using some gullible if not biased loyal and foreign media, sowing the seeds of negative force and perpetuating them. They used the art of continuing miscommunication to clothe them with believability,” he added.
The Palace official also made it clear that the judiciary “sees to it that the law is applied equally to all, bar none.”
“These special rapporteurs should by this time realise that they, who believed in the untruthful advocacies of the electorally vanquished pretenders, have likewise been demolished, beyond redemption,” he said. (SunStar Philippines)