A HUMAN rights lawyer slammed President Ferdinand R. Marcos, Jr.’s claims of a bloodless drug war and a functioning judicial system in his third State of the Nation Address (SONA) last week.
“While we may agree that the drug campaign is less bloody, there are still killings,” National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers (NUPL) President Ephraim B. Cortez told BusinessWorld in a Viber message at the weekend.
The same modus of planting evidence is still being practiced. A case in point, is the alleged buy-bust operation in Batangas, where the policemen admitted that there was no buy-bust and that they planted evidence.”
He added that while the country has a judicial system in place, “the big question is whether the government has conducted honest-to-goodness investigations into the killings.”
Mr. Marcos earlier said “extermination” had never been his policy in the fight against illegal drugs.
He said authorities had seized more than P44 billion worth of illegal drugs and arrested over 97,000 drug personalities in more than 71,000 operations.
The University of the Philippines-Diliman Project Dahas said it had counted more than 700 drug-related deaths under Mr. Marcos’ term.
“The rule of the game is still the same, and it is being implemented by the same agency with trust issues,” Mr. Cortez said. — Chloe Mari A. Hufana