The following is a news item from the Philippine Daily Inquirer, posted on 14, Jan. 2008:
PNP: Extra-Judicial Killings Fell by 83% in 2007
MANILA, Philippines -- Seven cases of
unexplained killings of political activists and journalists were handled
in 2007 by the Philippine National Police (PNP) task force created to
investigate such murders, a sharp drop from the 41 cases it investigated
in 2006, according to a yearend report submitted to the Department of
Interior and Local Government (DILG).
A DILG statement said Sunday this represented an 83-percent decline in
so-called extrajudicial killings.
The statement said Director Jefferson Soriano, Task Force Usig
commander, had also reported that the group filed last year 20 cases
against suspects in the murders of political activists and another two
for the killings of journalists.
The spate of extrajudicial killings, estimated by Karapatan at over 800
in the past five years, has put the Philippines on the human rights
watch list of the United Nations and the U.S. Congress. A U.N. special
rapporteur criticized the Arroyo administration for not doing enough to
stop the killings, many of which had been linked to government
anti-insurgency operations.
Interior Assistant Secretary Danilo Valero said the sharp decline in the
number of political killings last year, as well as the filing of cases
against the suspects, "underline the Arroyo government's strong
commitment to human rights and its firm resolve to put an end to these
unexplained killings and put their perpetrators behind bars."
Valero said the killings reported to the task force last year were those
of activists Willie Jerus, Jose Maria Cui, Dalmacio Gandinao, Alfonso
Capiales and Renato Pacalde, and journalists Carmelo Palacios and Ferdie
Lintuan.
Valero said the yearend statistics showed "the creation of the task
force has been a deterrent" to such crimes.
Task Force Usig was created in 2006 as the government's response to the
extrajudicial killings.