THE Supreme Court has stood pat on its order to the government, through Solicitor General Jose Calida and PNP chief Ronald de la Rosa, to produce documents that could help give a clear picture of the Duterte government’s war on drugs.
Last March 3, the SC rejected the solicitor general’s motion to reconsider its December 2017 order. Calida argued that it could hurt police operations and impair national security. No, the high court ruled.
Impact of order
Why is the high court order significant?
It compels the government to disclose information that other agencies have asked for but failed to get. The ombudsman and Commission on Human Rights along with other entities, private and public, have been denied access to official data about the campaign against illegal drugs. NGOs engaged in protecting basic freedoms have not been able to check news reports against recorded facts.
President Duterte, news reports said, had verbally ordered law enforcement agencies to ignore the investigation made by local and foreign agencies on actual casualties: persons killed in “legitimate” police operations and deaths “under investigation.”
Figures vary on how many were gunned down resisting police arrest or shot dead by unidentified armed men. Estimates also differ on the extent of drug addiction in the country, raising doubts on how solution could be effective when the problem is either bloated or undersized.
Scope of discovery
From the SC order, a wide inquiry is made possible. It would look into the body count and how the victims were killed.
Consider: the court wants a list of Chinese and Chinese-Filipino drug lords “neutralized.” That means those arrested and charged or killed. And the drugs involved: shabu, cocaine, marijuana, opioids. Presumably to check the claim that Pinoys use cheap drugs, thus why more poor addicts end up as corpses on streets.
The SC also wants post-operation reports, police watch-lists in affected areas and specific incident files involving “salvaged” persons for whom complainants, a group led by a nun, filed the petition.
Record of “internal cleansing” within PNP, lists of cases probed by PNP’s Internal Affairs Service, and the warrant and warrantless arrests are also demanded by the court. It’s a wide, wide net.
Not “trier of facts”
It could be a case of over-reaching, the SC going beyond what it could do, which SolGen Calida raised but the court rebuffed. A valid question, it is: would and could the SC, which is not “a trier of facts,” look into all those data?
Clearly, that problem has not stymied the SC. It could be because the court thinks that since other agencies, government or NGO, have failed to unlock the information, it must itself take the initiative.
The reasoning beats all such state arguments as compromising police operations and prejudicing national interest.
Qualifier
Too soon for jubilation though. Malacañang talks of complying with the SC order (as if it had a lawful choice) but it has o a qualifier: “subject to security considerations.”
No one can be sure how much data will be redacted or blackened out for “security considerations.”
The SC and the public whose interest it is seen to uphold may only trust that enough light will be cast on murky areas of the drug war, which, sadly, has little prospect of being pursued lawfully or ended soon.