JERUSALEM – President Rodrigo Duterte vigorously defended his brutal war on drugs before Israeli businessmen, telling them that he values the “sanctity of life” even though critics brand him as a murderer.
”They said the criminals are being killed. But I have not for the life of me, ordered the killing of a particular person. If you happened to be there, sorry. If you are into drugs, sorry. That’s your fault, you asked for it,” Duterte said in a lengthy speech at a business forum here.
Despite mounting criticisms against his administration’s bloody crackdown on narcotics, the President reiterated that his order to the police to “kill by all means” is only if their lives are in danger.
“If you have to kill, by all means, kill. And there is only one everywhere the same philosophy is that you can only kill if your life is also in danger. So if the enemy wants to kill you, then feel free to kill him first,” he said.
The firebrand leader slammed his critics, associating his war on drugs to extrajudicial killings.
“I am now being charged with violating human rights. Now there is no such crime in the Revised Penal Code about what is extrajudicial killing. There is murder, homicide, everything but extrajudicial killing is very, very foreign to us,” he said.
Duterte, a former prosecutor, also blasted human rights advocates who sued him before the International Criminal Court.
“You know you idiots there, you can never acquire jurisdiction over my person. Not in a million years,” he said.