The Commission on Human Rights (CHR) has noted with "grave concern" the unabated killings linked to the government's continued operations against illegal drugs despite the community quarantines set due to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.
Human rights issues in 2020 were tackled by the CHR in its report entitled "Rights during a Pandemic: The 2020 Annual Report on the Human Rights Situation in the Philippines."
The report was signed last June 30 by CHR Chairperson Jose Luis Martin Gascon and Commissioners Karen Gomez-Dumpit, Gwendolyn Pimentel-Gana, Leah Tanodra-Armamento, and Roberto Eugenio T. Cadiz.
One of its biggest concerns in the report was the drug war killings of suspects and other persons.
From March 31 to May 31, 2020, data obtained by the CHR showed that law enforcement agencies conducted 5,840 anti-drug enforcement operations which resulted in the arrests of 10,105 suspects and deaths to 67 persons.
These numbers, the CHR said, provide "credence" to the statistics that state agents killed 42 suspects during the lockdown from March 15 to May 5, 2020.
The CHR also documented 69 alleged extrajudicial killings (EJKs) done during the lockdown.
"The last time the Philippine government released official data about the total number of EJKs in the country was in Dec. 2019," the report said. "The PDEA (Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency) tallied 5,563 cases as of Dec. 31, 2019, while the PNP (Philippine National Police) recorded 6,600 cases as of June 18, 2019, whereas human rights organizations cited 27,000 EJK cases as of Dec. 2018,” it said.
Aside from the killings, the CHR documented other grave human rights violations such as torture, enforced disappearances, and arbitrary arrests. "Arbitrary arrest cases were particularly worrying as some were combined with cruel forms of incarceration being in place," the report said.
From Jan. to Sept. 2020, the CHR has received five complaints of enforced disappearances with a total of eight victims. These complaints came from regions III (Central Luzon), IV-A (Calabarzon), and XII (Soccsksargen), it said.
"Torture still exists even during the pandemic, and even with the Anti-Torture Act of 2009 in place," the report lamented.
"In fact, CHR Region I Office documented one torture case involving one Carl Max Papa, a rape suspect. Allegedly, he was maltreated by some PNP officers of Aringay PNP, Aringay, La Union, before he managed to escape. Later, his cadaver was found in Tuba, Benguet," the report also stated.
Another case mentioned by the CHR in its report involved the Facebook post made by Elsa Calderon-Carlos dated May 1, 2020, where she alleged the torture committed against Guillermo “Emong” Calderon, a person with disability (PWD), by the elements of Jala-Jala Municipal Police Station.
The report pointed out that to help investigate these cases of unlawful killings and human rights violations, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the CHR entered into a data-sharing agreement (DSA) to further strengthen the mandate of Administrative Order No. 35, which created an inter-agency committee on EJKs, enforced disappearances, torture, and other grave violations of the right to life, liberty, and security of persons.