The civil society-led Truth Commission is taking steps to build a registry that would harmonize the total death toll in the so-called war on drugs during the Duterte administration, as the number has remained a point of contention even with the alleged mastermind, President Rodrigo Duterte, soon facing trial in an international tribunal.
To do this, the commission on Tuesday called on the victims’ families to submit the names for the planned registry, and for organizations, lawyers, as well as journalists and researchers to share their records of the killings.
The former chief executive and ex-mayor of Davao City, who is detained in The Hague, is charged in the International Criminal Court (ICC) with three counts of murder for allegedly masterminding the bloody anticrime model first implemented in Davao City and then replicated at the national level when he became President in 2016.
The drug war led to some 30,000 killings, according to estimates by international and local watchdogs. The police, however, put the official figures at around 6,000.
Difficult to ascertain
‘The actual numbers are difficult to ascertain because government documentation is flawed. In the course of the commission’s work so far, and according to previous findings by rights groups and journalists, the documentation that exists is riddled with death certificates that contain questionable details and incomplete or faulty police reports, to cite two problems,’ said the Truth Commission.
It pointed to figures cited by then national police chief Ronald ‘Bato’ dela Rosa during a Sept. 5, 2017, hearing in the Senate, who told lawmakers that since he assumed office on July 1 of that year, 2,216 drug suspects had been killed in supposed legitimate operations.
But Philippine National Police (PNP) figures, dubbed ‘Real Numbers PH,’ already showed 3,811 deaths from July 2016 to Aug. 29, 2017.
To address the issue of conflicting data, the new registry, which would cover drug-related killings from 2016 to 2022 or under the entire Duterte presidency, aims to be representative of various records and ‘help establish what happened, hold people responsible, compensate families, and prevent a repeat.’
‘It also aims to make the wider effort to record the killings more visible,’ said the commission.
The commission has also sought help from the government, including the PNP and the Commission on Human Rights, for their own data, such as police reports, autopsy findings, court documents, and photographs.
Statements of cooperation
Carlos Conde, commissioner and spokesperson for the Truth Commission, said that the government agencies have yet to comply with the request, but they have issued statements of cooperation.
‘We are so looking forward to that happening,’ he told the Inquirer. ‘In the case of the PNP, their statement of support is quite important for obvious reasons. Their cooperation should be a first step forward for some measure of accountability for killings attributed to law enforcers,’ Conde added.
For Bono Olgado, the commission’s director for documentation, archives, and memorialization, this initiative is about ‘asking whether we can build a shared layer that connects [records] while respecting and protecting the people and communities who have stewarded these records.’
The database of various organizations was ‘built by many hands long before the Truth Commission existed,’ Olgado added in a statement.
In the ICC, the crimes against humanity case of Duterte, now at the trial phase, covers the killings of 76 individuals in 49 encounters with either police officers or masked gunmen. The prosecution has proposed to add eight more incidents tied to the charges to bring the total incidents to 57, should the Trial Chamber III grant this request before the start of the trial on Nov. 30.