ICC case totally based on biased, inaccurate reports
Last of 2 parts
LAST Monday I wrote about how the International Criminal Court’s two prosecutors’ report on alleged widespread extrajudicial killings (EJKs) under President Duterte’s war on illegal drugs (WoD) were to a great extent based on biased and false articles in the news website Rappler, which was dedicated to demonize the former president. In short, it relied for its accusations on media accounts, which in a system of justice are mere hearsay, inadmissible as evidence.
More than 27 percent (116 out of 441 citations) of the sources the ICC used were from Rappler, which strived for six years now to portray Duterte as a bloody authoritarian. The ICC prosecutors swallowed hook, line and sinker that outfit’s claims, even if many of these — such as their false report on number of those killed — had been incontrovertibly proven to be false. Very anomalously, the ICC prosecutors didn’t cite articles in mainstream media that had been operating for decades and had proven to be accurate and objective, and which presented a different picture from what that website, just a few years old then, claimed.
The ICC based its recommendation to undertake a full-blown investigation of alleged EJKs during Duterte’s administration on three other sources that were nearly as fanatically partisan against the WoD as Rappler. These were Reuters’ reportage from December 2016 to mid-2017, as well as those also during this period by the Manila office of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
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