Marcos’ new human rights ‘super body’: abuse window-dressing in the Philippines?

Jose Deinla, secretary general of the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers – a nationwide voluntary organisation of lawyers and law students providing pro bono legal services – told This Week in Asia that Marcos Jnr had everything to gain from establishing the committee as it “deodorises his administration’s odious human rights record and distracts attention from grave human rights and international humanitarian law violations”.

Marcos Jnr last week signed an administrative order to create the Special Committee on Human Rights Coordination, which the Presidential Communications Office described in a press release as a “super body” that will take a “human rights-based approach towards drug control and counterterrorism”.

The committee will fall under the Presidential Human Rights Committee and is meant to replace the structures established by a United Nations Joint Programme, which focused on building capacity and technical cooperation on human rights reforms, after it ends on July 21.

Marcos Jnr’s executive secretary, essentially the president’s chief of staff, will co-chair the committee alongside the justice secretary, with the secretaries of foreign affairs, interior, and local governments serving as members.

During Duterte’s term, the strongman made international headlines for his administration’s bloody war on drugs that killed more than 12,000 Filipinos, mostly poor city dwellers, according to estimates from human rights groups.

Critics say Marcos Jnr’s new human rights committee lacks substance and have called it an attempt to conceal the ongoing human rights violations occurring under his administration and those that took place while his father, Ferdinand Marcos Snr, ruled the country.

Marcos Jnr has repeatedly refused