US city council adopts resolution against EJK

THE city and county council of San Francisco in the United States has adopted a resolution “condemning” President Rodrigo R. Duterte’s administration “for its role in state-sanctioned extrajudicial killings (EJKs) by police and for its continued detention of Senator Leila M. de Lima.”

San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, according to its official website, passed a resolution on April 23 supporting US House Resolution No. 233, authored by Congresswoman Jackie Speier who represents California’s 14^th congressional district. The resolution also urges San Francisco’s Federal representatives “to support a congressional hearing on the consequences of US tax dollars being used to fund these activities, and advocating for the US to cut aid to the Duterte regime.”

In a statement on Sunday, Presidential Spokesperson Salvador S. Panelo said: “It is astonishingly incredible and amazingly perplexing why men and women of arts and letters such as the San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors could believe the false narratives as well as the bogus statistics cited in the Duterte administration’s drug war, fed to them by biased news agencies, anti-Duterte trolls and a biased alleged labour and environmental activist from San Francisco and Richmond.”

He said the resolution “is a toxic and unacceptable intrusion to the country’s legal processes and an outrageous interference with our country’s sovereignty.”

“Like some US Senators, the San Francisco Supervisors have either developed an amnesia or have not outgrown their colonial mentality. They should be shaken from their stupor and wake up to the fact that the Philippines had long ceased to be a colony of the United States and will never be a vassal to it,” Mr. Panelo said.

He said extrajudicial killings or deaths arising from drug-related killings “are absolutely not state-initiated nor sponsored, proof of which is the death of scores of policemen coupled with the serious injuries to hundreds of others.”

Citing the recent Ombudsman’s dismissal of a Manila police officer for killing an epileptic in the course of a raid and last year’s conviction of three Caloocan police officers for the August 16, 2017, killing of Kian delos Santos, Mr. Panelo said the administration “does not tolerate police abuse.”

“Failing in convincing the majority of the Filipinos of their peddled falsities against the President, the few vociferous anti-Duterte personalities turn to foreign politicians or international human rights groups vulnerable to misinformation and gullible to untruthful narrations against this administration who then either unwittingly lend hand to — or ignorantly parrot — the detractors’ pretended patriotism and politically motivated advocacy,” Mr. Panelo said. — Arjay L. Balinbin