FORMER president Rodrigo Duterte will confront members of the House quad committee for canceling its scheduled hearing into his administration’s bloody war on drugs after the former chief executive accepted its invitation.
Salvador Panelo, Duterte’s former chief legal counsel, confirmed that the former president would go to the Batasang Pambansa in Quezon City and would dare the quad comm members to a “marathon hearing.”
“PRRD (former president Duterte) and I will go to Batasang Pambansa tomorrow at 10 a.m. and confront the Quad Committee members why, after demanding his presence and [after he accepted] their invitation… they will just cancel it without prior notice,” Panelo said in a statement.
Former president Rodrigo Duterte. PHOTO: MIKE ALQUINTO
“He will ask them to schedule a marathon hearing of 10 days,” he added.
On Monday, Duterte accepted the invitation to attend the 11th hearing of the quad committee scheduled for Wednesday.
But the House Of Representatives’ website showed that the joint hearing of the House Committees on Dangerous Drugs, Public Accounts, Public Order and Safety, and Human Rights set for Nov. 13 had been postponed to Nov. 21 to give lawmakers enough time to vet affidavits that witnesses and resource persons had already submitted.
The quad committee has invited Duterte to its hearings twice, but he has not attended them for various reasons.
On the first occasion, his lawyer said he could not make it because he was tired from a trip to Manila, but he promised to attend a hearing after Nov. 1.
But later, through the said lawyer, the former president said his appearance before the quad committee was no longer needed as he had told everything about the drug war to the Senate blue ribbon committee.
Duterte’s drug war has been one of the major topics of the quad committee hearings, especially after revelations made by retired police colonel Royina Garma about the existence of a system that rewarded those who killed drug suspects.
Garma testified that Duterte called her in 2016 to create a task force that would implement the so-called Davao template for a war on drugs on a nationwide scale. The Davao template, Garma said, involved providing cash rewards worth P20,000 to P1 million to police officers who kill drug suspects.
She also claimed the existence of the Davao Death Squad — a team that former president Duterte supposedly formed.
The quad committee said it postponed its hearings from Nov. 13 to allow vetting of affidavits from witnesses who had already given their testimonies to the panel.
In a press conference on Tuesday, quad comm overall chairman Rep. Robert Ace Barbers said that the quad comm’s legal team is now interviewing potential witnesses and vetting each affidavit that they are submitting to the panel.
“Because of the several witnesses who wanted to give their testimony before the quad comm, we decided that we should maybe interview them all first. We will see who is the more credible there, and it would take a lot of time for us, so we decided that before we set this meeting again, we should confirm who will be facing our committee,” Barbers said in English and Filipino.
Quad comm co-chairman Rep. Danilo Ramon Fernandez added that they had already decided on the postponement before they received any official word from Duterte regarding his attendance at the hearing.
“All of the persons that we invited… are being invited again so that we have a much longer preparation time to attend in our hearing,” Fernandez added.
Zambales Rep. Jefferson Khonghun, meanwhile, said if there is no direct statement from Duterte himself, any statement should be dismissed as “mere propaganda.”
Barbers also criticized Panelo for misinforming the public regarding the attendance of the former President at the hearings.
“OK, just to be clear, on 21 we have hearing; you can go there after the 21st; let us know when you are available because we will schedule a date convenient for you so we can fix our invitation,” Barbers said.
In other developments:
– The Akbayan party-list on Monday called for the passage of a bill to protect innocent civilians, especially young people, from the “brutal impact” of state-sponsored violence. In a statement, the party-list group said House Bill 11004, dubbed the “Kian” bill, named after Kian Delos Santos, who was killed by police in Caloocan City, aims to “prevent further victimization of innocent people and pivot the government’s approach to a public health framework and bring to justice both the drug lords who have largely evaded accountability and the enforcers responsible for extrajudicial killings (EJKs) in the infamous Tokhang operations.”
“We need to ban Tokhang-style operations, illegal police operations, unlawful raids, and other terror-inducing and cruel methods that have traumatized urban poor communities yet spared the drug kingpins,” said Akbayan Rep. Percival Cendaña.
– Sen. Risa Hontiveros said President Marcos could correct a “monumental mistake” made by the Duterte administration by letting the Philippines rejoin the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Philippines withdrew from the ICC seven years after the ICC, in 2017, announced an investigation into Duterte’s bloody war on drugs. The senator, in a statement on Tuesday, said the country’s withdrawal from the ICC was prompted only by the “selfish interests of former President Duterte.”
“If President Marcos really puts importance on justice and rule of law, he should correct the mistake of Duterte and make the country rejoin the ICC,” Hontiveros said. “In order to save himself, he (Duterte) put the entire country in peril and denied the Filipinos the most important mechanism of justice,” she added in Filipino.
WITH BERNADETTE E. TAMAYO AND ARIC JOHN SY CUA
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