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The dark legacy of extrajudicial killings in the Philippines

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• Claire Donnelly
• Meghna Chakrabarti

While in power, former Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte ordered the murder of thousands of people without trial.

Journalist Patricia Evangelista chronicles the leader's bloody 'war on drugs' in her memoir "Some People Need Killing."

Today, On Point: The dark legacy of extrajudicial killings in the Philippines.

Patricia Evangelista, journalist. Author of the recent book “ Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country .”

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Patricia Evangelista is a trauma journalist and a former investigative reporter for the Philippine news company Rappler. Beginning in 2016, Patricia reported on former Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte's so called 'War on drugs.' And we will be talking about what Patricia saw during that time, so as a warning, we may actually also discuss some graphic descriptions of violence and therefore this hour may not be appropriate for all listeners.

But Patricia shares her story about her life during that time and about her country during that time in the new memoir, “ Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country .”

Patricia, welcome to On Point.

PATRICIA EVANGELISTA: Thank you for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: You start the book with a young 11-year-old girl named Love. And you describe how when you meet her, you kneel down and you tell her your name in order to open up at least some kind of rapport between you and her.

And then Love tells you the story of what she had experienced. Can you tell us her story?

EVANGELISTA: I met her when she was very young. She was 11 years old. She was small for her age. All skinny brown legs and big dark eyes. And she was born Lady Love, that was her name. But, nobody called her Lady, everyone called her Love, and only her father called her Love. Just Love. And she lived in the second floor of a shanty with her mother and her father and her many little siblings, and there were many of them.

And one night, late in the night, two men wearing dark masks kicked down the door, and Love's father was asleep. One of the men with a gun stood over Love's father and said, Positive. Positive, he meant, positive for being a man on the list of illegal drug users or dealers. Love's father tried to get up.

But there was a baby asleep on his chest, so he fell back down again. And then he turned his head, he looked at Love, and he said her name. He said, Love. And that was the last word he said before the bullet cracked across his temple. So the baby woke up. And the baby was covered in blood, so he was wailing.

And then Love's mother dropped to her knees. She tried to proffer the sheet of paper that said she had already surrendered, that she had changed her life. And she begged for her life. But the gunman stood in front of her and lifted the gun. It was Love, who stood between the gunman and her mother.

And it was Love who stood with a barrel of the gun just inches from her forehead. And it was Love, all skinny brown legs and big dark eyes, who swore at the gunman and told her to kill her instead. So the gunman left, and they didn't, they weren't gone for long. When they returned, they stood in front of Love's mother, and then raised the gun.

The gunman said, "[Translation] We are Duterte." And then he emptied the magazine. And Love's mother died on her knees.

CHAKRABARTI: What was Love's demeanor like when she told you what had happened to her parents?

EVANGELISTA: She was quiet. But, when you're a trauma reporter, you don't read much into demeanor very often, because people absorb trauma very differently. Sometimes they weep, sometimes they're angry, sometimes they refuse to talk.

With Love, she was shy. She was a little shy. And, but, she was not unwilling to speak. Interviews like this, you don't really ask about feelings. You can't. Because to ask someone, "How do you feel?" in the aftermath of traumatic events is uncomfortable and difficult. And a little unfair. Because of course you're broken, of course you're traumatized.

So what you do instead is you ask facts. What was your father wearing? How big was the room? At what moment did the gunman raise his arm? Because those things, they're factual, you don't have to dig very deep into them. And then when you do what I do, you ask the question, so you can build the scene in your head. So that you can walk into the room yourself again and see the gunman and see the color of the shoe and see how the door opens so that you can tell people the story.

CHAKRABARTI: Did she understand? Not just what, obviously, she knew what had happened to her parents, but did she understand the supposed reason why or where the order had come from?

EVANGELISTA: In the case of Love, the killers were vigilantes. They were not policemen who would, in the aftermath, as is in most cases, would say her father fought back.

As with other little girls who saw their fathers die. In Love's case, it was two men wearing masks. She was aware that there was a threat. Before her parents died, she was very afraid. Because while she had never seen her father use drugs, there were rumors that he was using, and they were living in a place where anyone could be a snitch.

That's why her parents surrendered. In the Philippines after the election of Rodrigo Duterte, people who were suspected of being drug dealers or drug addicts or drug users were invited to surrender to the government and promised they would never sin again. So they're called surrenderees. And allegedly, if you are on the surrendered list you are monitored for your behavior.

There's a larger list. It's called the drug list or the narco list or depends on who you're talking to. These are people who are suspected of using and dealing drugs. And people who are included in that list can be sourced from other surrenderees. Or your next-door neighbor or someone who doesn't like you who decides to put your name anonymously on a drop box.

Or in the case of one man who was killed in Manila, his neighbors voted that he was the worst drug suspect in town. So the police conducted a raid. It's what killed him. Love was not unaware of what was happening. She was trying to convince her parents to leave, but they didn't believe there was a major threat.

CHAKRABARTI: How many interviews like that did you have to do?

EVANGELISTA: I couldn't tell you if I tried, dozens, possibly a hundred. I really don't know, because in the course of one night, in the height of the drug war, there were killings every night. There were nights when there were 9, 16, 27, and I didn't call for all of them because they were happening across the country.

And while there were a handful of us in the night shift, photographers and reporters from across Metro Manila, there was no way we could hit every crime scene. Particularly for myself, I'm a long form narrative investigative reporter, I need to see the whole picture. The rest of the reporters might be peeling out to go to the next scene, I would stay because I have to complete the picture.

So in the course of one story, let's say Love's story or someone else's story, I would be doing three, four interviews. If I were present at the crime scene, which I wasn't in Love's case, I would be interviewing. I would be interviewing the neighbors. I would be interviewing the families. I would be interviewing anyone who I could possibly talk to across the next week or across the next few months.

So I can't give you a number, but there was a lot.

CHAKRABARTI: You write in the book about having to stand over corpses at 2 a.m. And how hard it is to not just process but describe what that is like. Can you describe what that's like?

EVANGELISTA: I can't quite describe what it is. Because when I stand over a body, I'm a reporter.

It's a job. And part of that job is to ground yourself so that you are able to complete the image in your head. I can tell you what the color of the shoe is, or what the tenor of the scream was, but I can't tell you how I felt. Because I felt nothing. That is also the job. I'll tell you instead how I ground myself, so that you can see how it operates.

I work with the night shift, as I mentioned, and it was an honor to work with them. It's photographers and reporters, some of them foreign correspondents, some of them locals, and all of us would stay outside the press corps office of the Manila Police District. Unlike most of them, I didn't go every day because I had to go to the funerals and to the field and to find the sources, so I would go maybe twice a week.

And when it happens, sometimes you get an alert while you're sitting in the press office, or sometimes while you're outside smoking, you see the homicide car spill away and the scene of the crime operatives. So you follow them. Or the longer the war, the more sources we had, families who we had interviewed would tell us about their neighbor or their friend or standing at the corner of the road seeing another body being pulled out.

You go to the scene, and you see the body in the ground. You see the yellow police tape around it. You see the cops counting the bullets. For me, what I would do, was I would ask the same questions every night. Was it a drive by, a salvaging, a body dump, a buy bust? Was the killer a cop or a vigilante? Were the hands bound?

Was their head wrapped in tape? Was the body stuffed into the bag? Was there a sign beside the body? Was there a gun on the ground? So I went through a checklist. I hit every point, one after the other, confirm the street corner, interview the investigating officer, sidle up to the bystanders, find out if they know the man's name.

But what I learned with the drug war, as well, was that there was a value in standing still and just listening for the screaming. Because that's what you know where the family is. You walk up to them, you apologize, you condole, you keep your voice low and your questions short, and then you find out what happened, and then what happened next.

CHAKRABARTI: I should note that Patricia did much of this reporting at the time working for Rappler, the online Philippine news source co-founded by Maria Ressa, who later won the Nobel Peace Prize. Now, Patricia, President Duterte was elected on promises to execute this war on drugs in the Philippines.

He was very clear about how he would supposedly rid the Philippines of both drug dealers, gangs, and the users, as you mentioned. You quote him in the book as saying, "Hitler massacred three million Jews. Now there are three million drug addicts. I'd be happy to slaughter them." Here's his actual voice.

This is from a rally in 2016, telling his supporters that he had killed criminals himself, and here's what he said.

PRES. DUTERTE: My campaign against drugs will not stop until the end of my term. That will be six years from now. Until the end of my term, that will be six years from now. Until the last pusher and the last drug lord are [slashing gesture across throat.]

CHAKRABARTI: That sound that he makes at the end is accompanied by Duterte making a slashing gesture across his throat. How bad was the drug problem in the years before Duterte was elected?

EVANGELISTA: The Philippines, like any other country, does have a drug problem, but the most, right before President Duterte was elected, the survey the most recent survey conducted was that the Philippines had half, less than half the global average when it came to drug use. And a lot of those users were one-time users, a lot of the users also used marijuana. Although what concerned the president mostly was the use of meth. He claimed that anyone who had used meth for more than a few months would no longer be people.

And he said anyone who believed him, or who refused to believe him, that the effect of addiction was a terrible thing. He said, I will give you the drugs themselves. Feed it to your children. Watch them become monsters. He created an enemy, he exploited every grievance, every fear, fueled by decades of failed expectations, and he gave it a name.

He called it the drug scourge. And he said he would kill the drug dealers, and he would kill the drug addicts, and he will protect the future of your children.

CHAKRABARTI: I want to talk about his own history in just a moment, Patricia, but you write in detail about Filipino history. And I wonder if you could talk about what you think it was or is about the country's colonial and post-colonial history that allowed this violent rhetoric and then action by President Duterte to actually resonate with enough Filipinos that they put him into office. Because this war on drugs happened in a democracy, right?

So was the Philippines already a nation so repeatedly traumatized that a president saying, I will kill every last drug dealer and user, regardless of their age, in this country that made that, didn't make it seem out of the norm.

EVANGELISTA: We are a violent country, but you are correct. We have been traumatized for hundreds of years, and we're not good with reckoning with our trauma.

Even in near history in the '70s and '80s, we had the martial law dictatorship. We called it the conjugal dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, and they were overthrown in 1986, and that's when the democracy came back to the Philippines. And just very recently, we elected as President, Ferdinand Marcos, Jr.

His vice president is Sara Duterte. Just to demonstrate how little we are able to hold our leaders accountable and how much of a failure there is in national memory. It is the same with years of colonization and it is the same with years of trauma that we don't account for. So when we elected Rodrigo Duterte, we may have elected a man who said, I will kill them all.

But we also elected a man in an excess of hope, that this man was different, that he felt the same rage as everyone else, and that when he came to power, life would be different for all of us who have been shamed, who have been ignored, who have been told that we just have to take it and swallow it and roll over.

Yes, all of it mattered. Colonization mattered, poverty mattered, predation mattered, a failure of accountability mattered. All of it mattered. And then, after years of terrible things happening, the terrible became ordinary. And then we applauded.

CHAKRABARTI: Duterte also frequently called himself an ordinary Filipino. That he understood deeply and knew the sentiment of Filipinos living far outside of Manila, for example. In the eyes of the international community, perhaps we did not pay sufficient attention to someone like Duterte prior to him becoming president.

So I would actually love to hear from you some of a detailed history of who he was, and in fact, how he ruled even before becoming the leader of the entire nation. So first of all, was he an ordinary Filipino?

EVANGELISTA: He does like to say that often. I am just an ordinary Filipino. I am one of you. Occasionally he says I'm just an ordinary killer.

And he said he was with the poor, he understood the poor. But Rodrigo Duterte was a governor's son. And he grew up in Davao City, in a relatively comfortable life. He went to private schools, his mother was well known in the city, was in fact a very civil minded individual who read, led protests against the dictatorship.

So certainly, he was not poor, he was not very much ordinary, but he was, as most people have described him, something of a troublemaker. He liked women, he liked guns, he was described as a troubled son of privilege. But he eventually became a lawyer, he went to school, in part, in Manila, and did get into some trouble there.

He admits to having shot a frat friend in the hallways of his old school. He was still allowed to graduate. They thought it would be a failure of the system if someone so promising were kept away from becoming a lawyer. So he became one. When he went back to Davao City, he worked in the prosecutor's office. According to some sources, with some pull from his mother to his father's friends.

And then the revolution happened in 1986. Corazon Aquino became president after the dictator, the martial law dictatorship. And across the country, people were being put in as officers in charge of cities. Because an election would come in the aftermath of the revolution. They wanted, as vice mayor for Davao City, where Rodrigo Duterte comes from, his mother. Soledad Duterte, but she said she would prefer it was her son who sat in office. So Rodrigo Duterte became vice mayor of Davao City on the heels of the revolution, of the peaceful revolution that overthrew a dictator. And he said he supported that revolution. After that, he ran as mayor. He won and ran again and again and again.

More than two decades of Duterte leadership in Davao that included his sons and his daughters. Until now, actually, the mayor of Davao is also a Duterte. But while all this was happening, Davao was notorious for being a hotbed of communism and crime. That people would be killed on the streets randomly.

The right-wing rose, vigilante groups, and Duterte allegedly, again, supported these vigilante groups that took down the communists. When the communists, when the communist threat lessened in the '90s. A new threat rose. They call it the Davao Death Squad.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Patricia, do you mind if I just pause here for a second because there's a lot of detail that you bring in the book about this period in particular.

So first of all, about the sort of the communist groups in Davao. As you write, and this is important to understand, because it really lays the groundwork for what happens later. Yes, there were these vigilante murders essentially, death squads that were organized to purge what was described as a communist insurgency in Davao, but you point out in the book that action was — and please correct me if I'm wrong, but supported by then President Corazon Aquino and the United States?

EVANGELISTA: Yes. The answer, according to Corazon Aquino, to violence from the communists, is the sword of war. At that time, it was supported by Corazon Aquino, it was supported by the U.S. State Department. We were friends with America, and so across the country, this sort of violence was supported. In fact, one of the vigilante groups in Davao City, one of the more violent ones, called the Alsa Masa, the masses arise, was cutting quite a swath in Davao, and Corazon Aquino went to Davao City and said she would, was proud to be standing in the birthplace of the Alsa Masa.

CHAKRABARTI: They were so effective that the so-called communist threat was reduced. But as you said, then under Duterte's mayoral rule of Davao, there emerges a group called the Davao Death Squad. And reporters at the time wrote, and you quote them in the book, that the repertoire of warfare drawn from both military counterinsurgency as well as communist guerrilla methods and practice was perfected during the dictatorship and proved equally effective in a democracy.

And Duterte himself said, I don't mind us being called the murder capital of the Philippines, as long as those being killed are the bad guys. From day one, I said henceforth, Davao will be very dangerous for criminals. It's a place where you can die any time. Now, the extent of how these death squads operated.

Did he ever once admit that there was a direct connection between him and the actions of the Davao Death Squad?

EVANGELISTA: Rodrigo Duterte says a lot of things. Sometimes he will say, "I am the death squad." Sometimes he'll say, "I have guilt." Under oath, he says, I don't know of any Davao Death Squad. I'm not responsible for a so-called Davao Death Squad.

Perhaps it's the gangs, perhaps it's the criminals. Many things have been said about his responsibility. Certainly, he denies it, that he had anything to do with it. And then when he does say, he does threaten. He says it's a mere rhetoric. He said very often in Davao, as you just quoted, exactly, what he also says to the rest of the country.

If you break the law, if you commit crimes, if you are a danger to the children, my city, my country, I will kill you. That is not a rare thing for him to say. So the death squads, as far as we can tell with investigations, as well as whistleblowers, was composed of former Sparrow Units from communist groups.

Sparrows are assassins, assassin teams working with the communists. They also included former members of the Alsa Masa or other vigilante groups. And they also included former or current police officers.

CHAKRABARTI: Now, regarding the former or current police officers that were in these death squads in Davao.

You tell the story of Arturo Lascañas, who was the police master sergeant in Davao. Duterte's right hand man there denied any complicity in the violence that was happening there, but had a massive 'come to Jesus moment,' is how you call it, in February 2017, where he gave a press conference, and then thereafter admitted to killing after killing after killing, in detail.

And would you tell us the story of one of the descriptions he gave of people he was told he and his group were told to root out and kill. It was about a group of Chinese drug dealers.

EVANGELISTA: Right. You're right that it was a 'come to Jesus moment.' It was a pretty literal come to Jesus moment. He had a nightmare, he was sick, and then he dreamt of Jesus and woke up and he changed.

Arturo Lascañas was allegedly Duterte's right hand man, at least when it came to the Davao Death Squads. And he had a number of stories to tell in the aftermath of deciding to be a whistleblower. He said that he was asked to kill eleven Chinese drug dealers. He only killed nine because he assigned two to someone else.

He was also asked to kill a kidnapper, except when they stopped the van that was carrying the kidnapper, the alleged kidnapper. He was there with his wife, with his son, and with his father-in-law, and with his household help. Allegedly, he and the other member of the death squad had gone to the mayor at that time, Mayor Duterte, and said, "What do we do?"

And the suggestion of the other person was, "Erase them." So they were erased. They were killed. And Lascañas stood outside the door. And listened to them shot. He had tried to make a case for the young boy to be allowed to live, but he lost the argument. So he listened, as they were all killed and then the bodies were buried, and he came back a few days later and poured oil over the dead.

And one of them, as you said, was a four-year-old boy. And you write that their wallets, bags, and a pair of children's shoes were also burned. There's much more to discuss, to understand not only why all this happened in the Philippines, but the long-term impact on the Filipino people as well. So we'll talk about that in just a moment.

CHAKRABARTI:  I want to play a little bit more of what Duterte himself has said in the past Patricia, if I may. He has actually admitted to killing people himself. So this is from a 2015 interview that he did with Maria Ressa, whom I mentioned earlier was one of the co-founders of the Filipino news site, Rappler.

And at the time, Duterte was the mayor of Davao City, as we have been talking about. And he said quite clearly to Maria that he believed criminals have no redeeming reason to live.

DUTERTE: There's no redeeming factor in killing people, robbing them, raping them, robbing them, and.

RESSA: So no qualms about killing killers?

DUTERTE: Yes, of course. I must admit that I have killed. Three months early on I killed about three people.

CHAKRABARTI: Patricia, in your book you write about how Duterte is very specific about not just saying I have killed, but I have killed people. You write that he's very particular about using that noun. What does that tell you?

EVANGELISTA: Rodrigo Duterte is careful with language, even as he is very verbose with language. It's not so much the use of people or the use of kill. He doesn't like to use the word murder. For him, or he claims, murder means killing a bound man or killing a man on his knees begging for his life. That's why he denies that any extrajudicial killings happened during his term.

He denies that he supports murder. He supports killing, to kill legally. He says they will have to perish. He will say they will have to be wiped off the face of the earth. He would say I would like to do it myself, shove them out of helicopters, let them drown in a ship in the Pacific, hang them with barbed wire.

But he would tell his police in public. You don't have to kill illegally, because you can kill legally. And he says, I declared a war. What is wrong with that? He says, what is wrong with saying, [Translation] I will kill for my country. His claim is that killing is justified because these are not people.

CHAKRABARTI: And he's completely unapologetic about it. Every bit of concern that anyone within the Philippines or in the international community raised about human rights violations, he overtly said he didn't care. For example, here is an interview that he did with Al Jazeera English about 100 days into his presidency.

So he's now the leader of the entire nation. And this is in 2016. And he claimed that the Philippines had millions of drug addicts and said that he could not help it if vigilantes basically sometimes took justice into their own hands. And he also said, as I mentioned, he did not care about human rights.

DUTERTE: You destroy my country. I'll kill you. If you destroy our young children, I will kill you. That is a very correct statement. There is nothing wrong in trying to preserve the interest of the next generation. The three million addicts, they are not residents of one compact area or contiguous place. They're spread all over the country. I do not care about what the human rights guys say, I have to strike fear. I have a duty to preserve the generation.

CHAKRABARTI: Patricia, I feel it's important to emphasize to our audience here, that's mostly in the United States, I'm gonna say it again and again, because you say it in the book.

This all happened in a democracy. The Philippines isn't some far off nation across the ocean.

EVANGELISTA: Oh, no, we're not.

CHAKRABARTI: It is a nation that the United States has had a long involvement with, first and foremost. Whose original constitution was modeled after the United States Constitution.

Filipino people, work around the world. So this isn't something that just happens over there.

EVANGELISTA: No, it's not.

CHAKRABARTI: So what I want to know is while we are focusing on Duterte and his overt blood lust as the strategy to manage a so-called war on terror, as you said earlier, not all of the killings were done by police.

Some of them were done by vigilantes. You told us the story about the neighborhood that voted, right? To identify someone as needing killing, quote-unquote. Something is also going on with the people of the Philippines that allows the, essentially, the blood to spread across the country. And I think, to be frank, it's hard for me to understand how that happened again in a democracy, that people embraced, enough of them embraced the idea of extrajudicial killings.

It's not just wanting vengeance against drug dealers. It's a vengeance happening completely outside a moral or legal framework. How did that happen?

EVANGELISTA: The Philippines is not an exotic country. What happened there is happening everywhere else in the world. And it's easy to dismiss the words of a campaigning strongman as just rhetoric, but we can't afford to.

And it's a lesson we learned, that when strongmen promise to kill, they mean it. When they say they will suppress the press, they mean it. When they demean women, they mean it. And when they use words to threaten, they will act on those words when they have power. And, but what I want to emphasize is it's not a strange thing that it happened in the Philippines.

There are charismatic men all over the world who will make promises, say outrageous things and glory in the crowds they draw. And sometimes what they say is dangerous. But not dangerous enough. Take back the border. Make the country great again. Protect the children. Then the dial turns just a little bit, and then they say more dangerous things.

Maybe they'll say kill the drug addicts, or kill the activists, or kill the journalists. Maybe it's kill the shoplifters, shoot the migrants, the election workers, the judges. That's what happens. The terrible dust became ordinary, it's happening everywhere. And the Philippines? We're just a cautionary tale for places in the world where a politician is charismatic enough to blow a dog whistle and say, some people need killing.

But it's not a rare thing. You just have to stand on the line every time and say, it shouldn't happen here.

CHAKRABARTI: Here's an example, much closer to home.

DONALD TRUMP [TAPE]: These people are killing people when they go into the stores. You'll have 300 young people who are not looking for a good future, walk into a store, big department store, and just pillage it.

And if you happen to be there when they're there, they'll knock the hell out of you and kill you in some cases. And we will immediately stop all of the pillaging and theft. Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.

CHAKRABARTI: Donald Trump in California in 2023. But Patricia, I want to emphasize something. Many Americans, even some still in the media will say, "That's just campaign rhetoric. He doesn't really mean it. Don't take it seriously. It's what you say as a charismatic campaigner.

Don't take it seriously."

EVANGELISTA: There are many words for that. Don't take him literally. It's just imaginative language. It is just rhetoric. It is too dangerous not to take seriously. And even if he wasn't serious at that time, it is what the people want to hear. And then he will be forced to do it. Once he is in power, or he will feel that it is important to do this because it is what the nation wants.

Regardless, even the act of saying it matters. To say some people need killing does turn the dial, does reduce a drug addict or a drug dealer, or a shoplifter or an immigrant to less than a human being. So I think the lesson we take from my country, the lesson we take every day is that sometimes wars aren't just metaphorical.

CHAKRABARTI: You write in the book, speaking of your country, that there came a time where you felt like you could no longer recognize it. Can you tell me what you meant by that?

EVANGELISTA: I have been a trauma journalist for 15 years. I do not traffic in hope. And I have reported on many terrible things, massacres, disasters, events with death tolls of 6,000.

So it does not shock me. Blood on the ground does not shock me. Brutality does not shock me. What surprised me with the drug war was not so much the blood. It was the fact it was applauded. Whenever I covered massacres or traumatic events, my job was to tell the story, investigate what happened, point a finger, if a finger is supposed to be pointed, and then move on to the next story while people at home will say, will read the story, will watch the news and say, what a terrible thing.

After Duterte was elected, it seemed like it was a sea change. What a terrible thing became what a beautiful thing. On the day, 32 men were killed by police in a 24-hour period in a single city, Rodrigo Duterte sauntered up to a podium and said, What a beautiful thing, more should die. That was what I couldn't recognize anymore.

Not that terrible things were happening, but these things were good. And that, as a journalist, my choice to cover these stories was not just a choice of any journalist. Suddenly, it had to become resistance. To choose it was already resistance. I was not comfortable with it. I didn't understand that the democracy I understood was not the democracy some of my fellow citizens saw.

And I see it very differently now. It's not that I was alone in covering the war. It's not like I was alone outraged by what was happening. There were many people, many survivors, many activists, many lawyers, many journalists who stood up and some of whom paid quite a high price for standing up.

So my thought right now is it's still my country. And I'm going back on the field. That's the job.

CHAKRABARTI: It is so clear in listening to you that you still possess, even though you say you may not be able to recognize, the country that you love, that you still love your country, that you still love your people. So it must be akin to a kind of profound heartbreak to not be able to recognize the country and people that you love so.

EVANGELISTA: I think through the four, the seven years of the war and the four years of writing the book I have understood my people better. And certainly, I don't subscribe to thinking that this is the choice to vote for Duterte was an inane thing, that it came out of nowhere or people are fundamentally violent or destructive.

People voted for Duterte for many reasons. Some people just felt, some people were hungry, some people felt the predation of many years. Some people didn't believe that he would kill people. Some people just wanted better. It was many reasons for many people that cannot be reduced to a single choice for death.

But what I also understand is that it matters how you tell the story. He told a good story, a powerful story, and he was a phenomenal storyteller. So all of us who maybe think different or maybe want to tell a different story. The value is keeping a record I don't believe in many things and I don't have a lot of expectations with anything.

I don't think telling one story as a single journalist changes many things, but I do believe in telling it just myself just keeping my own record.

CHAKRABARTI: Patricia. We're approaching the end of the hour, unfortunately, but I want to applaud you profoundly for your dedication and your bravery. And I recognize clearly the responsibilities you feel as a journalist.

When you said earlier, it's not your job to feel anything at the moment, but to report the facts. But can you take a second as we wrap up this conversation? I have to ask, doing this reporting has had to have an effect on you. What effect has that been?

EVANGELISTA: It would be difficult to describe it as you have told me I'm not allowed profanity in this interview.

But I will try to work around that. The trouble with doing what we do is that we're not cameras. We do not shoot, then print, then delete after. You keep all the stories with you. And every time you tell it, you walk into the room again, and then you hear the crack of the bullet, even if you were never there to begin with.

I think it's a matter of just taking it day by day, and telling the story as well as I can. And hope that every time, I have honored the people who had the bravery to tell me theirs. They're taking more risks than I have. And I hope to have done justice to them.

This program aired on March 5, 2024.

• Long-jailed former Philippine senator who fought drug crackdown is granted bail
• How one reporter tells the story of Philippines President Duterte's drug war
• Jailed under Duterte, Philippine politician sends dire warnings on democracy
• Patricia Evangelista's memoir revisits the aftermath of the Philippines' war on drugs : NPR's Book of the Day

Claire Donnelly Producer, On Point Claire Donnelly is a producer at On Point.

Meghna Chakrabarti Host, On Point Meghna Chakrabarti is the host of On Point.

More from On Point

2018 Articles

When Death Becomes Murder: A Primer on Extrajudicial Killing

J. Aceves, William

International law prohibits the arbitrary deprivation of life, which includes extrajudicial killing. This norm is codified in every major human rights treaty and has attained jus cogens status as a non-derogable norm in international law. In the United States, the Torture Victim Protection Act (“TVPA”) establishes civil liability for extrajudicial killing. As evidenced in the TVPA’s text and legislative history, the definition of extrajudicial killing is based on international law. Despite the clear meaning of the TVPA’s text and the clarity of international law, the TVPA’s definition of extrajudicial killing is still contested in litigation, and some courts express uncertainty about its meaning. This raises a simple question: what constitutes an extrajudicial killing? This Article reviews the status of extrajudicial killing and clarifies its discrete elements under international law. It then considers the status of extrajudicial killings in the case of Mamani v. Berzain, a TVPA case involving the responsibility of the former President and Defense Minister of Bolivia for the killing of civilians in a 2003 government crackdown.

• Extrajudicial executions
• International law
• Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991 (United States)
• Human rights

Extrajudicial killings in the Philippines

This country spotlight refers to data published in 2019. For the most recent data, go to our Rights Tracker .

‘War on drugs’ is a denial of the right to life

Since the election of Rodrigo Duterte in June 2016, a violent ‘war on drugs’ has claimed upwards of 5,000 lives in the Philippines. Executions by police and militia groups that target drug dealers and users not only exacerbate the drug problem but constitute a violation of the right to freedom from execution by extrajudicial killing.

On July 1st 2016, Oliver Dela Cruz was shot to death in Bulacan province during a police sting operation. He was playing cards at a friend’s house when a group of armed men broke in, interrogated and executed him. Police denied any responsibility, blaming vigilante violence.

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the Philippines has signed, recognises the right to life. The death penalty was abolished in the Philippines in 1987, and the country signed the Second Optional Protocol to the ICCPR, becoming part of the global movement against the death penalty.

Under the ICCPR, the right to be free from execution also covers arbitrary and extrajudicial killing. The Human Rights Measurement Initiative tracks the performance of countries around the world on upholding these rights.

The killings of Mr Dela Cruz and thousands of others are a denial of the right to life, the right to freedom from execution.

While the current administration is not directly responsible for the authorisation of these extra-judicial executions, Agnes Callamard, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Killings, blamed Duterte’s hard-line approach and rhetoric for exacerbating the violence and denounced the lack of investigation into the killings.

Police and militia groups are not being held to account for their actions. This is a rejection of the government’s obligation to investigate violations of the right to life and the right to freedom from extrajudicial killing.

The right to freedom from execution

According to international law, the right to be free from execution includes freedom from any arbitrary or extrajudicial deprivation of life, as well as freedom from the death penalty even with due process of law (ICCPR, Part III, Article 6; Second Optional Protocol to the ICCPR, Article 1).

This is a fundamental human right that must be respected and governments are legally obligated to do what they can to prevent such killings and hold those responsible to account.

HRMI’s Civil and Political Rights data collection

In 2019, we collected information on civil and political rights in 19 survey countries via a secure online expert opinion survey  (please note this is a link to a preview of the survey only, and any responses you make will not be collected).

These countries were selected based on the following two criteria:

• Sufficient interest from human rights experts in that country for inclusion (so that we could be sure to have sufficient numbers of survey respondents and active engagement during the survey).
• A sub-set of 19 countries that offered diversity of sizes, regions, cultures, income levels, degree of openness etc (so that we could learn how well our survey methodology worked in different contexts).

The graph below shows how the 19 countries in the HRMI survey performed on freedom from execution.

It seems likely that the Philippines would perform poorly relative to the survey countries, due to the number of unlawful executions carried out since 2016, but without data it is harder for human rights defenders to do their work and hold governments to account.

As soon as funding allows, we will extend our civil and political rights data collection to the Philippines and the rest of the world, and expand our full set of data to measure other rights protected by international law.

If you want to help fund our expansion to the Philippines, and all countries in the world, please contact us .

Who can use these data?

All of HRMI’s data are freely available to anyone. You can  explore our data site here , and even download the dataset.

We have data on seven  civil and political rights : as well as  five economic and social rights .

HRMI aims to produce  useful  data. Some of the people we expect will use our data are:

• Journalists, especially those reporting a particular country, and those focusing on human rights, politics, social issues or international affairs
• Researchers
• Government policy advisers
• Human rights advocates
• Human rights monitors within a region, and at the international level
• Companies, for decision-making, to minimise risk for investors, and direct capital flows ethically.

If you know anyone in those categories, please let them know about HRMI, in case our data can be useful to them.

HRMI’s data have been available for only a few months so far, but as different people use them, we want to share stories and case studies. Whenever you see our data in action, please tell us, and we’ll include a link on our website.

Thanks for your interest in HRMI. You are most welcome to follow us on  Twitter ,  YouTube ,  Facebook , and LinkedIn and sign up to receive occasional newsletters  here .

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In association with the International Commission of Jurists

The Cliff of Targeted Killings: From Rushdie to Al-Zawahiri

29 Aug The Cliff of Targeted Killings: From Rushdie to Al-Zawahiri

[ Marissa Kardon Weber is an international criminal and human rights lawyer. She works on strategic human rights litigation against Iran and its agents and instrumentalities in U.S. federal court on behalf of victims of hostage taking, torture, extrajudicial killing, and aircraft sabotage. The views expressed herein are entirely her own .]

Double Standards in Extrajudicial Killings?

The decades of treatment and recent likely attempted murder of novelist and defender of the freedom of artistic expression Salman Rushdie are nothing short of horrific.

The US government’s necessary concern for and response in support of Rushdie – and others targeted by the Islamic Republic of Iran on US soil including Iranian journalist and women’s rights activist Masih Alinejad and allegedly US officials – raises an important question: what are the significant differences, if any, between the Iranian regime’s targeted killings of these critics, dissidents, and political opponents and the US’s targeted killings of suspected members of terrorist organizations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen (notably Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri of al-Qaeda, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of ISIS, and Qasem Soleimani of the IRGC)?

There are certainly some significant differences – Iran’s targets generally have a demonstrated record of advocating for the protection of basic freedoms and human rights in Iran, likely in violation of “divine verses” , while the US’s targets generally have a demonstrated record of terrorist activities against Americans and US allies, likely in violation of international law.

However, as “likely” alone is not enough in any modern criminal justice system, there is an undeniable commonality that makes these differences irrelevant under international law: these killings, and attempted killings, are extrajudicial, or deliberately authorized by a state outside any judicial framework affording the targeted individual all judicial and due process guarantees.

As UN Special Rapporteurs on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions have repeatedly confirmed,

[t]he right to protection from arbitrary deprivation of life is a rule of customary international law, a general principle of international law and a rule of jus cogens . It is recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [“UDHR”], the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights [“ICCPR”] and regional conventions.( see here , para. 30, quoted by here , para. 33).

In order to be lawful, an extrajudicial killing must not only satisfy the domestic laws of the targeting state, but also “the legal requirements under all applicable international legal regimes: the law regulating inter-State use of force (jus ad bellum), international humanitarian law and international human rights law.”( see here , para. 30). When states like Iran and the US carry out extrajudicial killings that are patently unlawful or even ambiguously unlawful by their own intelligence community’s assessment, everyone suffers:the reliability and credibility of the state’s political and legal frameworks; the individuals deprived of due process; individuals like Rushdie and Alinejad who are at increased risk due to one state’s shielded reliance on another state’s use of targeted killings in ambiguous contexts; and the rule of law more broadly.

Legality Under Domestic Laws

Iran and the US have distinct justifications for their targeted killings under respective domestic laws. Iran’s are patently unlawful under international law while the US’s might not be tenable under international law.

Iran’s targeting of critics like Rushdie (note Iran has denied responsibility for his recent attempted murder), dissidents like Alinejad, and political opponents like US officials is governed by religious laws “ based on ‘Islamic criteria’ and an official interpretation of sharia [law]”. In the case of Rushdie, then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a 1989 fatwa, or legal decree, deciding that his literary work about the Prophet Muhammad’s life was “blasphemous” and warranted a death sentence and $3 million bounty for him. Since issuing the fatwa, Iran has repeatedly incited violence against him and called for his murder.

The Islamic Republic has targeted Alinejad through more veiled means. Instead of issuing fatwas ruling on her culpability, the government has persecuted her through public shaming and threats , designating her an “enemy” and punishing her collaborators with up to 10 years in prison, and arbitrarily detaining her brother. She was also the victim of two assassination attempts , both allegedly by Iranian agents. Her crime? Peacefully advocating for Iranian women to not wear hijabs if they prefer not to, in violation of Iranian law.

In their targeting of both Rushdie and Alinejad, Iran relies on religious laws to deprive them of basic freedoms protected under international law – namely their right to due process and freedoms of expression, thought, conscience, religion, belief of choice, association, and assembly enumerated in, inter alia , the ICCPR , to which Iran and the US are states parties, and the UDHR , of which they are both signatories. Even more, Iran strives to penalize them with capital punishment absent due process. As international law allows the death penalty solely for the “most serious crimes […] pursuant to a final judgment rendered by a competent court”, it is irrefutable that death is not a proportionate or humane punishment to sharing ideas in a book or women displaying their hair.

The religious bases of the Islamic Republic’s targeting alone are not problematic or determinative of its unlawfulness. Instead, it is the protected human rights that these religious bases violate, the disproportionality of the punishments, and the absence of due process that make them legally untenable.

For their targeting of individuals like Ayman al-Zawahiri, a top al-Qaeda leader allegedly behind the September 11 attacks, in Afghanistan, the US relies on the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (“AUMF”), which was enacted following the 9/11 attacks to authorize the President to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those […] organizations he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” While al-Zawahiri was a leader of al-Qaeda at the time that it carried out the 9/11 attacks making him a legitimate target under the AUMF, the Authorization continues to be broadly interpreted and applied. In response to al-Zawahiri’s killing, international law expert Professor Oona Hathaway wrote :

There is no sunset clause in the 2001 AUMF, but Congress clearly did not contemplate an endless war when it enacted the law more than two decades ago. There is a strong argument that the authorization has effectively expired, though the argument has yet to win in court when raised by those who continued to be detained at Guantanamo Bay under the authority indirectly granted by the authorization.

Following the evacuation of US troops from Afghanistan in August 2021, President Biden explained “the guiding principle behind” the decision:

We delivered justice in [2011] – over a decade ago. Al Qaeda was decimated.

[…] The fundamental obligation of a President, in my opinion, is to defend and protect America – not against threats of 2001, but against the threats of 2021 and tomorrow.

Twenty-one years after its enactment and one year after the US withdrew troops from Afghanistan due to no perceived ongoing threat against the US by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, the AUMF alone may no longer be an adequate legal justification for the targeting of al-Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan, even if the US remains concerned about their future actions.

Legality Under International Law

Ultimately, while the Rushdies and Alinejads of the world might be targetableunder Iranian law and the al-Zawahiris under US law, these actions are subject to the same international legal framework in which these domestic laws must operate. This includes the UN framework, international human rights law, and international humanitarian law, by which the US and Iran are bound.

Many international legal scholars and practitioners have recently discussed in detail the legality of the US’s policy of targeted killings under international law in the context of the Biden Administration’s July 2022 killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan. As they note, the overarching legal basis for killing al-Zawahiri would be the US’s jus ad bellum right of self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter. Under Article 51, international human rights law, and international humanitarian law, acts such as the extrajudicial killing of a person are legally justified if that person poses an actual, ongoing, or imminent threat. However, a recently released US intelligence assessment revealed that the US government could not have considered al-Zawahiri an imminent threat at the time of his killing because al-Qaeda “has not reconstituted its presence in Afghanistan since the US withdrawal last August” and “[t]he terror group does not have the ability to launch attacks from the country against the United States”. While the assessment’s reasoning is contested, it was prepared by the same intelligence community that would have informed the targeted killing in the first place.

This legal framework also requires that the state seeking to use force in the territory of another state must have that other state’s consent, unless they are responsible for the actual, ongoing, or imminent threat. It is highly unlikely that Afghanistan’s Taliban government consented to the US’s strike on al-Zawahiri as they publicly denounced the strike. The US has recognized a policy of not seeking consent from such a state if they are unwilling or unable to prevent or address the threat, yet this approach is widely debated and employed by a vast minority of states. ( see here and here ).

Even if an argument for the legality of the killing of al-Zawahiri can be made under international humanitarian law alone, which requires that an intentional and deliberate killing of a legitimate target (i.e. a combatant or civilian directly participating in hostilities) is guided by the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution, the killing fails to satisfy the“the legal requirements under all applicable international legal regimes”.

While these top experts did not reach definitive conclusions as to what the legal basis for the killing was, if any, this is the very issue: Where is the line? How much ambiguity is too much to justify such an intentional state action that has not been authorized via a legal process affording all judicial guarantees? The answer comes down to an analysis of the broader implications of these state actions.

Global Implications

A closer look at the disparity between the US’s killing of al-Zawahiri and the US intelligence community’s assessment of the threat of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and the ambiguity as to the killing’s lawfulness under both domestic and international law, requires a consideration of the broader implications of the US’s policy on targeted killings under its current legal framework. Arguably as important as lawfulness is the impact one state’s actions may have on the wider international community.

In response to the US’s comparable killings of Osama bin Laden in 2011 and Qasem Soleimani in 2020, then-UN Special Rapporteurs on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions condemned the US’s claims of self-defense as overly expansive, finding: “if other states were to claim the broad-based authority that the United States does, to kill people anywhere, anytime, the result would be chaos” and that it “is not just a slippery slope. It is a cliff.” ( see here and here , para. 64). Yet, other states do follow suit and claim the very same “broad-based authority” with dangerous results. In July 2021 and 2022, when Masih Alinejad was living in exile in the US, she was a victim of two failed assassination plots allegedly carried out by agents of the Islamic Republic on US soil. In August 2022, Salman Rushdie narrowly survived an attempt on his life by an alleged Iran and IRGC-sympathizer.

As Samuel Moyn explained :

The normalization of targeted killings, which is the killing of people off hot battlefields, is the single most sinister thing. […] The US has normalized it and claimed it’s legal. That means any other state, like Russia poisoning people, can claim it’s just acting in self-defense.

This is especially true in the context of both the US’s and Iran’s broadly and frequently applied policies on targeted killings, which are unlikely to address the root causes of the issues they are trying to resolve. Iran’s decades-long persecution of its critics, dissidents, and political opponents has done little more than induce fear and unite those in a position to speak up. At the same time, the US has conducted drone strikes killing members of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations for over 20 years. Some of these strikes have been “successful” and even considered lawful due to the presence of an actual, ongoing, or imminent threat and consent from the state in which it was carried out, such as in the 2002 case of Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi and five other men in Yemen (note even this targeted killing garnered criticism from the then-Special Rapporteur, see here , paras. 37-9). Still, al-Qaeda has only grown in size and strength since 9/11.

By continuing to engage in this conduct that fails to address root causes or generate sustainable progress toward their goals, the US and Iran have prolonged signaling to other states that they may act on the basis of the same flawed justifications. We have indeed seen other states do just the same throughout the past few decades.

A New Framework

While we can easily understand and support the US government’s support for Alinejad and Rushdie and wanting to bring to “justice” terrorist leaders posing threats to Americans, or any persons for that matter, we can just as reasonably conclude that the Iranian government is not able or willing to fairly prosecute Alinejad and Rushdie ( see e.g. , here ), while the US government has the resources and legal framework to do so of its targets. This comparison becomes untenable in circumstances of terrorists posing active, ongoing, or imminent threats to the US or its allies. However, when ambiguity reigns, steepened by a US-sponsored report admitting no imminent threat, we must question state policies that employ the very practices they aim to condemn.

It is true that “[g]overnments have a responsibility to protect their citizens against the excesses of non-State actors or other authorities […] in accordance with international human rights and humanitarian law” ( see here , para. 39). Yet they also have an equal responsibility to not be those very authorities from which other states must protect their citizens. It is not enough for the US, or any state, to speak out against Iran’s targeted killings on their soil while failing to carry out the very lawful conduct they urge Iran to employ.

A “legal process affording all judicial guarantees” such as prosecution is not always feasible, including in the case of al-Zawahiri. However, a targeted killing in such cases may be equally if not more dangerous than the risk of that single targeted individual contributing to a plan larger than themselves that could put a state’s citizens in harm’s way, particularly when the lawfulness of the targeting is not grounded in patent legality.

It is time to construct a more robust multilateral legal framework to rely on in instances where prosecution is not feasible and a targeted killing is unlawful, such as a multilateral joint declaration on ending such extrajudicial killings, providing enumerated actions that signatory governments would individually and collectively take in such circumstances. This move away from extrajudicial killings by government consent is instrumental in preventing the expansion of alarming and permissive precedent and encouraging compliance with and protection of the international legal order.

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Extrajudicial Killings in the Philippines Essay Example

• Pages: 2 (435 words)
• Published: November 18, 2017
• Type: Article

Extrajudicial killing is the political issue in the Philippines that the group chose. Extrajudicial killing is defined as the execution of a person or group of persons by state agents without due process of the law. The group chose a video presentation as the medium in order to cope up with modern times. The students would portray a certain situation in which extra judicial killing is exhibited. They chose this issue because it has been reigning in the

Philippines for such a long time that it has been embedded in the daily lives of the Filipino people. Extrajudicial killings became a way to silence people who are against the government. This problem led to severe graft and corruption because the check and balance cannot be conducted for the people who speak or know about It are silenced or abducted. W

hen you look at the government and Its citizens and see the different policies that are implemented and obeyed, you see the reason why or why not a country Is flourishing, this is the institutional theory approach.

The group views this political issue as institutional because In order to keep its citizens under its command, they would silence those who have Information that may disrupt the peace and stability. Hence, it became embedded In the culture so as they became accustomed to eliminating antagonists of the government In a snap. On that note, the group saw the problem in a cultural theory approach as well because It Isolates a particular value or tradition of people that whenever someone Is contesting your opinion, you have to dispose of them.

The group understood the difference between extr

judicial killings and political killings. Many people think that these two words mean the same but actually, these words are similar but not exactly synonymous. It can be said that almost all extra judicial killings are driven by political motive or agenda while political killings do not always have political agendas Influencing It. The class In which the video Is presented Is expected to differentiate the meaning of extra judicial and political killings.

The group also hopes to shed some light on taboo epic and why It Is considered as a political Issue that everyone should be aware of. Extrajudicial killings, though had been denied, have long existed In the Philippines and still continues to reign In the political arena. Because of these killings, anomalies and corruption stay rampant without being reprimanded and exposed. This exercise should be eliminated so as to promote the check and balance In the Philippine government. Subordination. Org/resources/PDF/ReportonPhilippineEJK20012010. PDF on August 5, 2013 at 6:56 AM.

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