Promoting human rights

Relatives of victims of summary executions and other human rights violations surely appreciate the expressions of concern and condemnation by certain members of the international community, directed at the Duterte administration.

So far, however, apart from raising the global profile of the former Davao City mayor, the condemnation has achieved near-zero change in President Duterte. 

Under the “reloaded” incarnation of Oplan Double Barrel, there are more arrests rather than executions of those who purportedly resist arrest or nanlaban. We rarely see cardboard signs declaring the dead as drug pushers who must not be emulated, and there are fewer “mummies” – corpses with the heads covered with plastic bag and packing tape.

Still, drug killings continue daily. Dirty Rody has promised to continue his war and has warned it will be “brutal.” Every condemnation from the international community elicits from him a public eruption of profanities and insults, and a dare to the international human rights police to come and get him.

Armed men are still barging into homes and shooting to kill, with a woman, her son and a visitor shot dead at her home in Caloocan City Sunday night. The woman’s five-year-old grandson was wounded as the armed men opened fire before fleeing on a motorcycle, the favorite getaway vehicle of criminals.

Duterte has vowed that as long as he’s president, no one can stop him. “There will be no letup until the last day of my term,” he reiterated yesterday.

And if certain foreign governments keep lecturing him on what to do, he’s going to turn to those who mind their own business. Especially those who offer to help him in his pet advocacies, notably the campaign against illegal drugs.

So he likes in particular China, Japan and Russia. The United States under Donald Trump is belatedly learning to deal with the volatile President Duterte, coursing concerns and criticisms through diplomatic channels while publicly promising support in the drug war and other areas.

By now it should be patently clear that Dirty Rody doesn’t relish being scolded by anybody, and especially not by Uncle Sam. No matter how valid the criticism, he sees it as an insult by a foreign government. The Chinese, who have the same mindset when it comes to their domestic affairs, grasped this intuitively, and look how cozy they have become with the Philippine President.

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If foreign governments want to push their human rights advocacies in the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte, they could have better results by providing assistance in certain areas.

One is in helping the country build more detention facilities and modernizing the existing ones. Because of extreme congestion, being incarcerated in the country’s jails and prisons is a human rights violation in itself.

You’ve seen the images: jails so crowded the inmates have barely room to breathe. The government is required to provide the basic needs of inmates, such as food and sanitary facilities, and state resources are stretched to breaking.

Many police stations lack running water even for their employees’ use. Now they have jails packed to the rafters, forced to function at 10 times their capacity, with inmates needing to be fed, to take regular baths, do their laundry and go to the toilet with a security escort at least three times a day.

Their cells must be cleaned regularly to keep out cockroaches, mice, dengue-causing mosquitoes and other vermin, but where do you keep the inmates during the cleaning? This is not a trivial question in small police stations which do not even have enough cheap plastic handcuffs.

The challenging logistics of keeping inmates is one reason there are cops who prefer to just get rid of troublemakers permanently. “Pakakainin mo pa yan” – you will have to feed him – is something you hear from police officers as they ponder the fate of arrested suspects.

Incarceration can also quickly turn new offenders into hardened criminals. As in the detention facilities in South America, Philippine jails and prisons are recruitment centers for organized crime rings including drug traffickers.

We need special facilities for young offenders. And while many folks probably want corrupt government officials to be among the victims of Oplan Tokhang, modern penology calls for special facilities for white-collar offenders.

If we have such facilities, we need not treat former presidents, senators and other ranking public officials accused of corruption like VIP inmates and allow them to enjoy “hospital arrest.” If there is decent detention available, even if modest, no white-collar offender gets special treatment.

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Logistics is a problem especially when cops consider that they could be saddled with the care of inmates for ages, while criminal cases drag on in the courts.

This is another area where foreign governments can combine their criticism with assistance. We need help in modernizing, cleansing and speeding up our criminal justice system. An efficient judicial system also means a quicker turnover of inmates in jails and decongestion of national prisons.

We’re not lacking in models for efficient justice systems, and their governments are already sources of official development assistance. Within our neighborhood alone there are South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore. Their judicial systems are also brutal – brutally efficient.

We can learn from the government of New Zealand, for example, about their system in which convicts are allowed to render supervised community service in lieu of incarceration.

As I have written, the head of a major organization engaged in development assistance told me recently that they had no projects for judicial reforms in the Philippines because the sector is in such a disastrous state they did not know where to start.

My advice to such sources of aid is to take a leaf out of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland: begin at the beginning.

We can use a lot of help.