During a press conference at the Heroes’ Cemetery yesterday, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said that Congress approved the PHP1,000 (US$20) budget for the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) because they were angry at CHR Chair Chito Gascon.
“No, he had it coming,” Duterte said.
He said this after a reporter asked about his reaction to the budget approval on Tuesday. “Is this your direct order to the majority?” the reporter asked.
“That 1,000 that Congress gave his office, [that’s because] Congress is angry at him,” Duterte said.
The president also criticized Gascon and the CHR for meddling in police investigations. Duterte said that joining police investigations will make it difficult for the human rights commission to remain neutral.
“What they should do is wait. They cannot just investigate… just guard the police, watch them. They collate… and then make a study, and then they file the appropriate recommendation,” Duterte said.
In the course of his critique, Duterte also erroneously said that CHR Chair Gascon was not a lawyer, the reason, he suggested, why Gascon failed to understand proper procedures.
“If you are not sure of yourself and where you stand, you might as well just, maybe, shut up,” the president said.
This, of course, is not true. According to GMA News, Gascon is a graduate of the University of the Philippines College of Law, passed the Philippine bar exam in 1997, and studied his Masters in International Law at the University of Cambridge.
The CHR has publicly spoken out against violence in the administration’s drug war.
During a committee hearing in August 2016, two months after Duterte took office, Gascon said that the number of deaths caused by the drug war was “unprecedented” since the CHR’s establishment 30 years ago.
Latest data from the Philippine Alliance of Human Rights Advocates show that there have been 12,000 deaths related to the crackdown.
More recently, Gascon spoke out against the war on drugs because of the number of teen deaths in the past month.
He told GMA News: “The deaths of children, the high numbers of persons killed in police operations, and the inability to apprehend vigilantes should prompt the administration to assess whether the current administration’s iron-fist strategy to its war-on-drugs is achieving is avowed goals.”
In July, Duterte threatened to abolish the CHR and said that he would not let the investigative body investigate the police or military without requesting permission through him first.
The CHR is an independent office that was established in the 1987 Constitution to investigate human rights violations. The PHP1,000 (US$20) budget voted by Congress is not final and still needs to be reconciled with a budget the Senate has yet to approve.
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