Nearly nine out of 10 people support Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs and almost three-quarters believe extrajudicial killings are taking place in the bloody crackdown, an Philippine opinion poll showed yesterday.
Duterte’s signature campaign has killed thousands and caused international alarm amid widespread allegations by activists that police are executing suspected drug users and dealers.
Police reject that and say every one of the more than 3,900 victims in their anti-narcotics operations were killed because they were armed and had violently resisted arrest.
Eighty-eight percent of 1,200 people surveyed by pollster Pulse Asia last month said they support the anti-drugs campaign, with 9 percent undecided and 2 percent against it, but 73 percent believed extrajudicial killings were taking place, up from 67 percent in June.
A fifth felt there were no such killings, as the authorities maintain, down from 29 percent in June.
The issue of extrajudicial killings is contentious in the Philippines, where definitions of what it means vary from those typically used by international organizations and human rights groups.
Pulse Asia in its survey defined the term as “killings done by people in authority, such as the police or soldiers, that do no follow the rule of law.”
Political analysts Ramon Casiple said the survey showed support for the crackdown from those who felt crime was being tackled, but reservations among those most affected.
“Communities with reported deaths, generally urban poor communities, are getting increasingly concerned of the killings,” Casiple added.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the