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Philippine Supreme Court Orders Release of Documents in Duterte’s Drug War

Relatives of victims of drug-related killings at a church in Quezon City, the Philippines, last month.Credit...Francis R Malasig/EPA, via Shutterstock

MANILA — The Philippines’ highest court ordered the government on Tuesday to release documents relating to thousands of deaths linked to President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war.

Rights groups quickly welcomed the Supreme Court ruling, saying it would give closure to many families of the more than 20,000 people they estimate have been killed in the crackdown that Mr. Duterte has justified as necessary to end the drug trade.

A court spokesman said the solicitor general had been ordered to submit police and other reports on the killings to the Supreme Court within 60 days and to copy the petitioners.

The solicitor general, Jose Calida, had argued that sharing the documents with third parties could jeopardize national security. The court had previously rejected the same argument after the petition was filed last February, when Mr. Calida sought to avoid submitting the documents at all.

The petitioners were the Center for International Law (Centerlaw), a rights advocacy group, and the Free Legal Assistance Group, which represents low-income clients.

The court has yet to rule on a separate petition by the Free Legal Assistance Group asking it to declare the police crackdown unconstitutional. The group says the police have been permitted to kill people suspected of selling drugs rather than arresting them.

The government says 5,000 deaths have occurred during police operations. But there are thousands more cases that are classified as “deaths under investigation,” including many that officials say were killings by pro-government vigilantes.

The majority of those killed were residents of poor communities or politicians whom Mr. Duterte had personally tagged as drug lords. The president’s critics have accused him of using the drug war to eliminate rivals.

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A funeral parlor worker transporting the body of a victim fatally shot by unidentified men in Pasay, south of Manila, last month.Credit...Francis R Malasig/EPA, via Shutterstock

Although three police officers were found guilty last year of the murder of a teenager mistaken for a drug dealer, rights groups say the killing spree has continued.

Romel Bagares, a lawyer helping Centerlaw in the case, called the Supreme Court decision a “big step towards establishing accountability” for drug war deaths.

In an interview, Mr. Bagares said the police reports should show whether proper procedures were followed. According to the operations manual used by the police, he said, the death of a suspect during an operation requires the filing of at least 30 documents, including a report to the state prosecutor seeking to establish that the suspect died while resisting officers.

“There ought to be 5,000-plus inquest reports there,” Mr. Bagares said, adding that for every report, the “forensics aspect should match the procedures for their use of force.”

The Supreme Court also ordered state attorneys to submit records for all “buy-bust operations” conducted in the San Andres Bukid district of Manila, the Philippine capital, where many of the killings have taken place. In 2017, Centerlaw filed a petition with the Supreme Court to issue a writ of amparo protecting residents of the district from the drug war.

Mr. Duterte already faces two murder complaints at the International Criminal Court, a situation that led his government to officially withdraw from the court last month.

The first complaint was filed in April 2017 by two men who said they had worked in Mr. Duterte’s death squad after he became mayor of the southern city of Davao in the late 1980s. The second was filed last August by relatives of eight people killed by police officers in the drug war.

Neri Colmenares, a rights lawyer who helped bring the second case to the international court, said the police had no choice but to comply with the Philippine court ruling, even if it angered Mr. Duterte.

In an interview, Mr. Colmenares demanded that the government follow the court order and provide copies of the police reports to lawyers representing the families of victims.

“This will help us see the true situation of human rights in the country in the time of Duterte’s drug war,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Justices Order Files Released Over Killings In Philippines. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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