A three-year-old girl has been killed in Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s so-called war on drugs.
Myka Ulpina was purportedly shot during a police raid targeting her father, Renato Dolofrina, in Rizal province near Manila.
The police said Dolofrina used the girl as a human “shield” during the raid.
The Philippine police have been exposed manufacturing evidence, planting weapons and drugs to justify thousands of executions.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) said it dismissed all police accounts of the killings.
“Deceit has become the hallmark of this brutal campaign in which the authorities admit 6,600 people have been killed – other estimates suggest as many as 27,000 – because all of them, according to the authorities, fought back, ignoring case after case in which witnesses say suspects were executed,” the New York-based NGO said.
Most of the victims killed in the drugs campaign lived in poor urban areas, HRW said. The United Nations children’s charity, Unicef, condemned the July 2018 killing of Skyler Abatayo, four, and that of five-year-old Danica May Garcia in August 2016.
Kian delos Santos, 17, was targeted for execution with a video showing him being dragged away by police before he was found dead in a pigsty.
The murder resulted in the only conviction so far of police officers since Duterte’s “drugs war” began. Child rights groups claim that more than 100 children have died since the campaign started in June 2016.
HRW said the deaths of Myka and other children, as well as the thousands of breadwinners for families, should prompt the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to report on the drugs killings and other Philippine rights violations.
“The resolution on the table is a modest first step, but if passed and implemented it can make significant inroads towards stopping the carnage in the Philippines,” the rights NGO argued.
President’s son
Duterte’s son said he might look to become lower house Speaker.
Paolo Duterte, 44, won a congressional seat in May’s mid-term election and has proposed to share the three-year Speaker term.
“We are not talking about two people here. We are talking about our beloved country,” he said of the political impasse in the chamber.
“It is not about speakership alone, but who is the right person to unite congress.”
Duterte said in June that he would resign the presidency if his son became Speaker because three Dutertes already held office. This includes his daughter Sara Duterte, his successor as Davao mayor on the violent island of Mindanao, and his youngest son, Sebastian, who is her vice mayor.
Sara is being tipped to run for the presidency in 2022.
The drugs killings have mainly targeted Manila’s poor communities. Picture credit: YouTube
