Philippines slams "unpardonable intrusions" by U.N. rights experts

MANILA, June 8 (Reuters) - The Philippine government
attacked United Nations human rights experts on Saturday for
"unpardonable intrusions", after a call for an international
investigation into killings linked to President Rodrigo
Duterte's war on drugs.
The experts on Friday urged the U.N. Human Rights Council,
whose 47 member states begin a three-week session on June 24, to
launch an independent inquiry into what they said was a sharp
deterioration in human rights across the country. The 11 experts said they "have recorded a staggering number
of unlawful deaths and police killings in the context of the
so-called war on drugs, as well as killings of human rights
defenders".
"The 11 U.N. Special Rapporteurs' act of peddling a biased
and absolutely false recital of facts, adulterated with
malicious imputations against the constituted authorities,
smacks of unpardonable intrusions on our sovereignty,"
presidential spokesman Salvador Panelo said.
The U.N. experts presented "general allegations culled from
false information," he said in a statement.
The Duterte government has insisted the more than 5,000
suspected drug dealers killed by police in anti-narcotics
operations all put up a fight.
Panelo described the U.N. experts as "foreign propagandists
masquerading as human rights protectors", and said their
comments were "an outrageous interference on Philippine
sovereignty".
He said those who have spoken against Duterte's
anti-narcotics campaign and human rights record have been
"overwhelmingly rejected" by Filipinos. He was referring in
particular to the Philippine opposition, which did not win a
single Senate seat in midterm elections in May.
"These special rapporteurs should by this time realise that
they, who believed in the untruthful advocacies of the
electorally vanquished pretenders, have likewise been
demolished, beyond redemption," Panelo said.
The U.N. experts had also accused Duterte of publicly
intimidating activists and Supreme Court judges, degrading women
and inciting violence against alleged drug pushers and others.