THE Department of Justice (DOJ) said on Monday it would convene the Administrative Order 35 Task Force within the month to discuss the growing number of killings and attacks involving activists, human rights lawyers and advocates.
The AO 35, headed by the DOJ, is an interagency committee (IAC) on Extra-Judicial Killings (EJK) that investigates summary killings, enforced disappearances, torture and other grave violations to the rights to life, liberty and security of persons.
Among the member-agencies of the task force are the Presidential Human Rights Committee (PHRC), Philippine National Police (PNP), Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the Commission on Human Rights (CHR),
Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra announced the meeting of the task force within month as he admitted his disappointment over recent police operations that elicited criticisms due to alleged violation of protocols and human rights.
“I was really hoping that with that statement I made before the UN [United Nations], our law enforcers would be more careful in their operations, but these things continue to happen so we really need to sit down—PNP [Philippine National Police], with the PDEA [Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency], and with other law enforcement [agencies] to make sure that we can prevent these things from happening; [so these] could be avoided, [so] we could do something about it,” Guevarra said.
Speaking before the United Nations Human Rights Council last month, Guevarra admitted that more than half of the police operations conducted under the government’s all-out war on illegal drugs failed to comply with standard protocols on coordination and processing of the crime scene.
He said the interagency review panel on deaths related to anti-illegal drug war will make sure sanctions are imposed on erring policemen.
“I am quite disappointed because it remains unabated notwithstanding my report before the international body. I don’t want to prejudge our law enforcement agencies if they had to do what they needed to. We don’t know the exact circumstance pertaining to each and every case that has happened but nonetheless, when they are deaths we have to do something about it,” Guevarra said.
Included in the agenda of the AO 35 Task Force, according to Guevarra, were the recent killings of nine activists and the arrest of several others in the simultaneous police and military operations conducted in the provinces of Cavite, Laguna, Batangas and Rizal on Sunday as well as several other alleged EJK incidents perpetrated by law enforcers.
“I have to take a look at these incidents yesterday. But, basically since there are many agencies that will be involved, so we would rather discuss it first in the interagency task force on extrajudicial killings and torture and other gave
violation of human rights.
“We will take that up on the agenda around 3rd or 4th week of March. We are setting up the agenda for that meeting,” the DOJ chief sad.
Guevarra said the task force would determine if it has jurisdiction to investigate these incidents.
He also stressed that if the killings involved “certain advocacies, whether it be trade unionism, or peasant associations or organizations or indigenous peoples, they would definitely be investigated by the task as it is within its jurisdiction.”
Guevarra doubts that President Duterte’s recent “shoot-to-kill” remark against alleged communist rebels prompted the PNP operation last March 7.
“I really cannot speculate if there is a connection with the President’s statement. The President has always been vocal about fighting…these communist terrorist groups…. That has been the President’s policy, to fight against communist and terrorist groups, ever since. So let’s see what really are the facts because right now we cannot tell yet that it was because of what the President said. We don’t really know the facts as yet, so the best thing to do really is to conduct a fact-finding investigation of what happened so that’s only the time we can probably make a conclusion,” he added.
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