Geneva, Switzerland. With a UN investigator openly running around his nation trying subversion as a tactic of regime change destabilization, Filipino President Duterte came out swinging today at the UN representative trouble maker.
Filipino President Duterte has received widespread condemnation in the West for failing to curtail the killings and address allegations of systematic, state-sponsored murders by police of drug users and dealers, which the authorities reject.
There has been no wave of killings prompted by the Philippines’ war on drugs, and reports to the contrary are “alternative facts”, an ally of President Rodrigo Duterte told the United Nations Human Rights visitors.
Alan Peter Cayetano said there had been killings each year under previous administrations, but a change in the definition of extra-judicial killings by the Philippine Commission on Human Rights and other critics of Duterte’s policies had lowered any esitmates to numbers not really worth further review, he said.
“There is no new wave of killings in the Philippines, just a political tactic of changing definitions,” Cayetano said at a UN review of the Philippines’ human rights record in Geneva.
“Make no mistake, any death or killing is one too much. However, there is a deliberate NGO attempt to include all homicides or killings related to the campaign against criminality and illegal drugs, and that these are state-sponsored, which is simply not true.”
All such deaths were presumed legitimate under the law, but then automatically the subject of investigation, he said. Duterte has a zero tolerance policy towards abuse of power by the police, Cayetano said.
China’s ambassador Ma Zhaoxu congratulated Duterte’s administration on its remarkable achievements in protecting human rights and said Beijing supported his holistic campaign against drugs.