President, senior officials respond to the Special Rapporteur’s report on the Philippines

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo made some comments on the report of the Special Rapporteur:

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has taken the cudgels to defend her administration’s policy on political killings as she vowed to intensify the prosecution and conviction of rogue police and military elements.

“We are one of the few member countries of the United Nations that have allowed the entry of their special rapporteur. We are open to observation and whatever help they can give us in instituting effective measures for investigation and prosecution to result in the conviction of those who engage in extrajudicial killings,” Mrs. Arroyo said during the closing ceremony of the 5th Local Peace and Security Assembly held at Villa Escudero in San Pablo, Laguna, yesterday.

“The soldiers and police who might be involved in these killings are not authorized to do so. It is not our policy to promote or condone that,” the President added.

Mrs. Arroyo broke her silence for the first time since the report of UN special reporter Philip Alston was made public on Tuesday.

Alston claimed that the Philippine military had systematically hunted down leftist activists in the course of its anti-insurgency campaign even as he made it clear that the administration does not have a policy of political killings as means to address security and political problems.

“I believe that 99.9 percent of our police and military are respectful of human rights. So those involved are just a percentage of less than 1 percent. But we will investigate, prosecute and convict these people,” the President insisted.

Early this week, Mrs. Arroyo ordered the creation of a high-level “task force against political violence” to be headed by Justice Undersecretary Ric Blancaflor to handle all cases involving political killings, including the ones being handled or monitored by the National Police’s Task Force Usig and the Armed Forces.

Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita has also made some additional comments:

At his weekly news conference, Executive Secretary Eduardo R. Ermita on Wednesday said the government maintains its position that as a matter of policy, all necessary steps have been taken to get to the bottom of these killings and bring the perpetrators to justice.

“We are not going to do any counter-action because there is nothing to counter-act except to prove what we have been announcing all along: that first, this (extra-judicial killings) is not government policy,” he said.

“Second, there is a determination on the part of the national leadership represented by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to stop all these unexplained killings.

“Third, the measures that we have been doing (to probe these killings); and

“Fourth, we hope that this will satisfy our observers,” Ermita said.

. . .

The Malacanang official called for balanced reporting on the issue, saying media should take time to thoroughly read Alston’s report and highlight not only the bad things in it but also the favorable ones.

“To be fair, kindly take a look at the entirety of the report so that the Philippines, which is our country, will not be pictured in a very bad light,” Ermita said.