The Philippines’ national police chief has said 712 people have been killed in police operations since 1 July in President Rodrigo Duterte’s hardline war on drugs.
Speaking at a Senate hearing on extrajudicial killings, Ronald Dela Rosa said 1,067 killings by vigilante groups had been documented over the same period.
The official tally for the past seven weeks is far higher than most unofficial counts of killings since Duterte was elected in late May.
Duterte ran on a no-nonsense, anti-establishment platform and promised to wipe out crime in his first three to six months in office. He has publicly stated that he will not pursue law enforcement officers who shoot dead drug dealers.
The 71-year-old leader, known locally as “the Punisher”, also urged citizens with guns to shoot and kill drug dealers who resist arrest and fight back.
He has sworn to continue his war on crime despite what he labelled “stupid” criticism from the United Nations, including from the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, who said the apparent support for extrajudicial killings was “illegal and a breach of fundamental rights and freedoms”.
Rights groups and Filipino politicians have accused Duterte of creating a wave of killings – both extrajudicial attacks carried out by police and vigilante hits.
Dela Rosa told the hearing that the country had 3.7 million drug users and that although much had been done to eradicate illegal drugs, the problem persisted.
He said that from 1 July to 21 August, police arrested 10,153 “drug pushers and users” as part of the “double-barrel” policy, a two-pronged campaign that aims to target both high-level criminals and street-level drug users.
More than 600,000 individuals had surrendered to police, Dela Rosa said.
The Philippine Senate and the commission on human rights have undertaken their own independent inquiries into the deaths.
During the hearing on Monday morning, senator Risa Hontiveros, a critic of Duterte, said: “The war on drugs should not be reduced to killings. We cannot play gods and decide whose lives matter and whose lives don’t. We must shift the focus in this war on drugs from vendetta to real justice, from shortcuts to reforms, from punishment to treatment.”
But Dela Rosa said: “If any policeman is found that he violated the law on self-defence, he will be investigated, prosecuted and accordingly punished”.
He said the police’s stand against extrajudicial killing was “uncompromising”. The police would never condone vigilante killings, he said.