In a speech yesterday, President Rodrigo Duterte compared prisoners to “monsters,” in an effort to reiterate his position against restorative justice.
“Those western countries believe in the positivism. You can make useful human beings out of him when he gets out. It has been debunked as negative,” he told a crowd yesterday at the 23rd anniversary of the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA).
“I know this. I was a prosecutor for nine years. My cases were like that,” he said.
Before being appointed mayor of Davao City in 1987 after the People Power Revolution toppled the Marcos Dictatorship, Duterte worked as a prosecutor for the Philippine government.
“No matter what kind of skills you [TESDA] give them, they are always looking for trouble,” Duterte said.
“They will hold up again, and they won’t mind going back to prison,” he added.
He also mentioned — without explaining how it’s related to the justice system — that prisoners lose their “gender identity.” He told audience members, “Most of them already lost their gender identity. Even girls, they have relationships among themselves, to a point where they would have acquired latent homosexuality.”
“You can’t rehabilitate them at TESDA. That’s nothing to them,” he said. “They have lost their sense of humanity. They are monsters in a sense that they are incapable of… they are into masochism,” Duterte said, speaking in incomplete sentences.
This was the same speech where he mistakenly said that those charged with crimes in France are “guilty before proven innocent.”
Yesterday, the embassy of France to the Philippines released a statement correcting Duterte. “We have to point out that, as in the Philippines, the presumption of innocence until proven guilty is at the core of the French judicial system, based on the principles enshrined in the French Declaration of Human and Civic Rights of August 26, 1789,” the statement reads.
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