For President Duterte, the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) deserves the P1,000-budget allocation from the House of Representatives for its alleged bias against the government’s brutal war on drugs.
In an interview with reporters on Tuesday night, the President said the CHR should have expected the outcome of its budget deliberation in the Lower House. He blamed CHR Chairman Jose Luis Martin C. Gascon for the drastic budget cut the agency suffered, saying, “he [Gascon] had it coming. Knowing Gascon’s pro-yellow leaning, he opens his mouth in a most inappropriate way…”
Yellow is the color politically associated to the Liberal Party (LP). Gascon was appointed chairman of the CHR in 2015 by LP stalwart and former President Benigno S. Aquino III.
Under Gascon, the CHR has criticized the war on drugs for allegedly tolerating police operatives to kill suspected drug criminals, instead of giving them due process.
Extrajudicial killings
Citing “concerns” over increasing incidents of extrajudicial killings under the Duterte administration, senators moved to restore the full budget of the CHR that was slashed to P1,000 in the process of approving the House-version of the 2018 national budget.
Sen. Francis G. Escudero, former chairman of the Senate Committee on Justice and Human Rights, vowed to enlist support of other senators to restore the 2018 budget allocation for the CHR when the Senate crafts its version of the annual money measure.
Escudero asserted that “the CHR is a constitutional imperative and a necessity, however inconvenient it may be for some,” adding, “I will fight to restore its budget.”
This even as the Senate Committee on Finance had also slashed to P678 million the CHR’s P749 million budget last year.
“It is unacceptable to forever regard the CHR as a toothless tiger if it is a state policy to secure, protect and guarantee the dignity of its citizens and to ensure fulfillment of citizens’ human rights,” said Escudero, who had filed in 2007 a still unapproved bill to “strengthen CHR by providing an effective and expanded structural and functional organization”.
Escudero stated that under Senate Bill 727, the CHR will be given prosecutorial powers over delineated forms of human- rights violations, which will aid the commission in ensuring effective and speedy resolution of all human-rights cases filed with the commission.
He noted that the CHR, under its current mandate, is “neither a judicial nor a quasi-judicial body and its jurisdiction is limited only to political and civil rights”.
The Senator lamented that “the ineffectiveness of the commission is due to its failure to prosecute reported cases of human rights violations. Its hands are tied because the existing law provides only investigative and advocacy powers.”
He suggested that the prosecutorial power sought to be granted will equip the CHR with “a significant power to fully realize its mandate under the Constitution.”