Official complicity[edit]
In its 2009 report Human Rights Watch criticised authorities for failing to act against the death squads. It condemned the then president, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo for tolerating the lawlessness, saying that she had, "largely turned a blind eye to the killing spree in Davao City and elsewhere."[10] In 2004 Arroyo had announced Rodrigo Duterte as her special adviser on crime, an appointment which was viewed as signifying her approval of extrajudicial killings.[5] Human Rights Watch also highlighted the inaction of the Philippine National Police and national institutions such as the Department of Justice, the Ombudsman’s Office, and the Commission on Human Rights. This official tolerance of vigilantism had created, they said, an environment of "widespread impunity".[10] From 2009 Philippines government institutions periodically stated their intention to investigate the death squads. On one such occasion the National Commission on Human Rights created an inter-agency task force to look into the matter. However, no real action was forthcoming.[12] In 2005 Bernie Mondragon, of Coalition Against Summary Executions (CASE), an NGO, said extrajudicial killings "are now the unwritten state policy in dealing with crime".[5] Later, in 2008 the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, Philip Alston, pointed out that the fact that the killers made no effort to hide their identity and threatened parents with the murder of their children, suggested a belief by the killers that they were immune from police action.[10]
In 2005 the deputy ombudsman for the Military and Other Law Enforcement Offices suspended four senior police officials for six months without pay because of their failure to solve a number of vigilante killings in their area.[10] In an official statement the deputy ombudsman said:[10] "The inability of the respondent police officers to prevent the summary killing in Davao City is an indication of gross neglect of duty and inefficiency and incompetence in the performance of official functions."
When the four officers were suspended the mayor of Davao, Rodrigo Duterte directed the four officials to file a petition for certiorari, on the basis that the penalty would demoralize the police, reportedly saying, "I have pledged to help [the police] especially when they are prosecuted for simply performing their duties,"[10] The suspension order was subsequently reversed by the Court of Appeals after the police officers filed a petition.
In 2012 the Office of the Ombudsman charged 21 police officers with a charge of simple neglect of duty over the vigilante killings.[6] The charge provided for penalties of 1-month suspension or a fine of 1 month's salary. Investigators from the Ombudsman's office found that there was an “unusually high number of unsolved killings” from 2005 to 2008 in the areas of jurisdiction of the officers’ precincts.[6] The officers ranged in seniority from police chief inspector to police senior superintendent.
Alleged involvement of Rodrigo Duterte[edit]
Former Davao City Mayor and current President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte has been heavily criticised by numerous organizations for condoning and even inciting murders to take place during his leadership. In the April 2009 UN General Assembly of the Human Rights Council, the UN report (Eleventh Session Agenda item 3, par 21) said, "The Mayor of Davao City has done nothing to prevent these killings, and his public comments suggest that he is, in fact, supportive."[13] Human Rights Watch reported that in 2001–2002, Duterte appeared on local television and radio and announced the names of “criminals”, some of whom were later executed.[7] In July 2005 at a crime summit in the Manila Hotel the politician said, "Summary execution of criminals remains the most effective way to crush kidnapping and illegal drugs".[14] In 2009 Duterte said: “If you are doing an illegal activity in my city, if you are a criminal or part of a syndicate that preys on the innocent people of the city, for as long as I am the mayor, you are a legitimate target of assassination."[2]
Duterte, responding to a reported arrest and subsequent release of a notorious drug lord in Manila, was also quoted as having said: "Here in Davao, you can’t go out alive. You can go out, but inside a coffin. Is that what you call extra-judicial killing? Then I will just bring a drug lord to a judge and kill him there, that will no longer be extra-judicial."[15]
Referring to the arrest of a suspected rice smuggler, Duterte also spoke out at a Senate hearing, saying: "If this guy would go to Davao and starts to unload (smuggled rice)… I will gladly kill him."[citation needed] For these comments Duterte was attacked in an editorial in The Manila Times, which condemned "the mentality of lawlessness and vigilantism."[16] The newspaper argued that this culture of impunity enabled those in power, including officials, "private warlords and businessmen vigilantes" to take retribution against those they felt had acted against their interests: "They kill journalists exposing corruption and human rights activists exposing abusive police and military men."[16] Following Duterte's comments in relation to killing a person suspected of smuggling rice, the office of the President of the Philippines then under Benigno Aquino III issued a statement saying, “Killing a person is against the law. The President has been firm in the belief that no one is above the law. We must not resort to extralegal methods."[17]
Commenting on Duterte, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions said in 2008, "The mayor’s positioning is frankly untenable: He dominates the city so thoroughly as to stamp out whole genres of crime, yet he remains powerless in the face of hundreds of murders committed by men without masks in view of witnesses."[10]
However, despite his earlier statements of support for the extajudicial killing of criminals, Duterte has constantly denied any involvement in the death squad.[18]
In a January 2016 decision by the Office of the Ombudsman on the investigation conducted by the Commission on Human Rights on the alleged death squad in Davao between 2005 and 2009, the Ombudsman found no evidence to support "the killings attributed or attributable to the Davao Death Squad, much less the involvement of Mayor Rodrigo Duterte" to such acts.[19] (Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales said she inhibited from these investigations because of affinity with Duterte. Morales is the sister of Atty. Lucas Carpio, Jr., husband of Court of Appeals Justice Agnes Reyes Carpio. Agnes and Lucas are the parents of Sara Duterte's husband, Mans Carpio. Sara Duterte is President Duterte's daughter and now-mayor of Davao City).[20]
When Duterte was elected president, he appointed Vitaliano Aguirre II, a former classmate, as his secretary of the Department of Justice. Aguirre had been the former mayor's lawyer against cases linking the latter to the death squads[21] as well as the lawyer of a policeman who owned a quarry site turned into a firing range where remains of supposed victims of these alleged death squads were believed to have been buried. Aguirre helped argue against the CHR's investigation of the said quarry site, succeeding in having an earlier search warrant quashed.[22]
During the Senate hearing on extrajudicial killings on September 15, 2016, Edgar Matobato, a former member of the "Lambada Boys" (later renamed the DDS) testified that then-Davao City Mayor Duterte ordered the group to bomb a mosque and to kill the Muslim brethren therein in 1993,[23] an event that another report on this so-called bombing placed as having been perpetrated by so-called “Christian militants” eight hours after Matobato's testified-to time of the incident, with no casualties reported.[24] Because of other inconsistencies in Matobato's allegations, Senator Panfilo Lacson invoked the legal principle of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus (false in one, false in everything).[25][26][27]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davao_Death_Squad 
