MANILA, Philippines – President Rodrigo Duterte wants his fiercest critic in the legislature, Senator Leila De Lima, to step down.

"Dapat ka mag-resign (You should resign), you resign," said Duterte, addressing De Lima during a short speech on Monday, August 29, in Tacloban City.

Not one to mince words, Duterte even said that if he were in her place, he would take his own life.

"If I were De Lima, ladies and gentlemen, I will hang myself. The innermost of your core as female being serialized every day," said the President.

He was referring to De Lima's private affairs, including her supposed romantic relationship with her driver, that are now public knowledge largely due to the President's announcement during the Philippine National Police service anniversary.

Duterte, who previously blasted De Lima for "immorality," said the lady senator would make a bad example for women.

"Pinapakita mo 'yan, you resign. Ano'ng pakita mo sa mga babae, 'Follow me,' sabihin mo? (You are showing that, you resign. What are you showing women, 'Follow me,' you will say?) This is how to be a woman of the world," said Duterte.

Last week, Duterte made public a matrix supposedly showing personalities involved in the New Bilibid Prison illegal drug trade. Senator De Lima and former Pangasinan governor Amado Espino Jr, now Pangasinan 5th District representative, are the two highest public officials in the matrix. (READ: De Lima denies Duterte drug matrix: 'It's garbage') – Rappler.com</s>President Rodrigo Duterte’s scathing attacks on Sen. Leila de Lima are far from over.

On Monday, the President said his nemesis should hang herself or resign from her post.

“If I were de Lima, ladies and gentleman, I’ll hang myself. Your life, as well as the innermost of your core as a female, is being serialized everyday,” Duterte said when interviewed in Samar where he visited the wake of PO1 Gary Cabaguing, who was killed during an anti-drug operation.

Duterte earlier slammed de Lima for being “immoral” for having an affair with her married driver, saying the latter profited from the illegal drug trade.

Yesterday, the President said de Lima should resign from her Senate post because she is no role model for women.

“Mag resign ka (You should resign). Wala kang ipakita…anong ipapakita mo sa mga babae (You have nothing to show. What are you going to tell women, follow me? [That] this is how to be a woman of the world?” Duterte said.

He admitted that his bad blood with de Lima started when she, as the chairperson of the Commission on Human Rights, investigated Duterte’s links to the Davao Death Squad (DDS), a vigilante group that killed suspected criminals in Davao City where Duterte served as mayor from 1998 to 2016.

 Duterte said DDS stands for Davao Development System.

“That is what’s tough. When I was the mayor, she said she would prove that Duterte is the leader of the DDS. Why do you have to interpret it the wrong way?” the President said.

“Sino bang gustong pumatay (Who really wants to kill?) You think it is very easy to kill a fellow human being? You build the nation on the bones of your countrymen?” he added.

Neither weak nor guilty

 But de Lima rejected Duterte’s advice.

While she admitted that she considered resigning because of the vicious attacks against her, she chose not to.

“After much reflection resignation at this point will be an admission of guilt and a sign of weakness and I’m neither weak nor guilty,” de Lima stressed.

The senator said she has no intention to attend the hearing of the House of Representatives on the alleged proliferation of drugs at the National Bilibid Prison during her term as Justice secretary.

“I have been adjudged guilty already by the President and do you think that House inquiry will be anything near fair to me?” de Lima said.

“I’m finished in so far as the President is concerned that is why he wants me to resign and then I will show up in that hearing? I won’t have any respect left for myself if I do that,” the senator added.

De Lima earlier said that she is willing to resign if the President can prove her alleged links to illegal drugs.</s>Philippines senator vows to press on in battle with 'The Punisher'

MANILA, Aug 30 (Reuters) - A Philippines senator who is leading an inquiry into the spate of killings unleashed by President Rodrigo Duterte's 'war on drugs' has vowed to press on despite bizarre accusations and insults raining on her from the country's leader.

Leila de Lima told Reuters on Monday she has no fears for her own life because it would be clear who was to blame if anything happened to her, but she has been warned by people close to Duterte to stop questioning the extra-judicial killings.

"Some of my closest friends, some of my family are pleading with me 'you better stop already, stop it, stop it, keep quiet or just quit so they leave you alone'. But I cannot do that," the 57-year-old lawyer and politician said in her Senate office.

More than 1,900 people have been killed in Duterte's war on drugs since he came to power two months ago, according to police figures. Police say the toll of about 36 people a day is a result of drug dealers resisting arrest or gang feuds.

De Lima set up a Senate inquiry into the killings and held the first two hearings last week.

On Thursday, Duterte accused de Lima of taking bribes from jailed drug lords. He has also said she is having an affair with her driver and at a news conference declared she was "finished".

On Monday he attacked her again, saying de Lima had lost face as a woman and that if he were her he would hang himself.

"What they are doing to me is even worse than death. The honour, especially my womanhood, my reputation," said de Lima, who denies all the allegations Duterte has made against her.

Duterte, sometimes known as 'The Punisher', won a May election on a promise to wipe out drugs and dealers.

But there has been an outcry from human rights groups over the sheer number of deaths that followed Duterte's victory and over his incendiary rhetoric, which they say encourages police to feel they can kill with impunity.

There have been cases when police officers have killed suspected drug dealers who were in handcuffs and in custody, civil rights lawyers have said.

There have also been hundreds of killings by anonymous gunmen. De Lima said witnesses had told her about one case involving a group of men dressed as civilians and wearing masks.

"From all indications, based on the account of those who witnessed it, those were actually police," she said. "Are these death squads? Who are they, and under whose direction are they doing that?"

She said despite Duterte's promises to go after drug syndicates and kingpins, it is mostly the poor who are dying.

"The ones being targeted are the powerless, the voiceless, the defenceless, because they are so poor. Where is the justice there, there's so much injustice," she said.

She said her Senate committee, which is due to hold another hearing on Thursday, was seeking facts - but it had no power to accuse or pursue any individual.

De Lima is hoping the hearings will speed the passage of legislation that has been stuck in Congress that would make extra-judicial killing a special crime with harsh penalties. She also wants to bolster the independent Commission on Human Rights (CHR) so it has more capacity to investigate violations.

De Lima said that the CHR and the police's internal affairs service were both overwhelmed and could only do so much, and a climate of fear meant people were reluctant to speak out.

"It's only the president who can stop all of this," she said. "I call this madness really." (Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)</s>Before the time he is ready to step down from office on June 30, 2022, President Rodrigo Duterte must have appointed 12 of the 15 justices of the Supreme Court. The number could even be higher at 13 if rumors that a powerful cabal moving within the Court and the Congress to oust Chief Justice Ma. Lourdes Sereno proved true — allegedly, and ironically, on charges of tax evasion.

If Sereno keeps her position, however, three of the six Supreme Court justices appointed by two predecessors of Duterte will be in the Court when he ends his term. The rest will have reached the mandatory retirement age of 70, and replaced by Duterte by then.

It would be a unique opportunity for a President who is both anti-elite and an outsider from the country’s traditional ruling class, to mold the Supreme Court, and therefore our legal system, according to his own unusual, pro-poor view of the world. The Supreme Court, even by design, has really been one of the bastions of elite rule, although there, indeed, have been unique cases when the Court defied the elite, as in its ruling that the Hacienda Luisita agrarian reform was fake. (It cost its Chief Justice Renato Corona his job, and tragically I have to say, even his life.)

But not only that, the reality of the legal community is that with Duterte picking 12 justices in the next six years, about two justices per year, he has in effect the means to ensure that the judicial system consisting of Sandiganbayan, the Appellate Court, and the Regional Trial judges support him, even in what would likely be his controversial moves.

Traditionally, and perhaps logically, (until President Aquino basically broke the practice and appointed mediocre legal academics like Chief Justice Sereno), justices of the Supreme Court are picked from the most experienced pool of judges and justices from the country’s advanced courts, mainly from the special anti-graft courts Sandiganbayan, the Court of Appeals and Regional Trial Courts.

It would be human nature, of course, for even these judges to aspire to the highest court of the land, which would be the pinnacle of their legal careers. While they would do so by seeking connections to the President, or to those close to him, the one thing they can do to increase their chances is not to cross the President in cases in which his policies and programs are put on the line.

The Commission on Human Rights and Senator Leila de Lima should kiss any plans of bringing to the courts their claims of extrajudicial killings goodbye.

Following is the schedule of retirements at the Supreme Court during Duterte’s term:

In contrast, Aquino was able to appoint only six Supreme Court justices, although Presidents Ramos and Arroyo did install 14 and 21 justices, respectively, but sadly failed to mold the Court to their world-views. Or did they?

De Lima should resign

 Sen. Leila de Lima should start thinking of giving up her Senate seat. Her position has become untenable, even as President Duterte, who has emerged as an extremely popular and powerful president, is undoubtedly out to bury her — and the scenario seems to be unfolding at this time when his political capital is at its height.

And for all of De Lima’s playing of the woman card, she has not at all denied that she has had intimate and sexual relationship with her subordinate Ronnie Dayan, her former bodyguard-driver. Shortly after his first de Lima slam, Duterte went for another strike by announcing in a televised comment that the senator has taken another lover, an MMDA motorcycle escort, after she apparently got tired of Dayan.

While we live in a liberal age, a senator having a relationship with her married subordinate, and allegedly gifting him with houses and even vehicles, create a dent on the integrity of the entire Senate, which is supposed to be a model of uprightness for citizens, and especially the youth.

If proven that she did gift her lover with houses, the obvious question is where could she have made the money for this when she had been in government for only 12 years since President Arroyo’s term, as head of the Commission on Human Rights?

What makes her position untenable is that she was Justice Secretary for six years, the Republic’s prime law-enforcement officer. Yet in her six years in office, just like his boss President Aquino, she had hardly alerted the nation to the rapid proliferation of illegal drugs and the monstrous social menace that has created. She hadn’t undertaken even a fraction of the scale of operations against it that the present administration has lunched in just two months.

It is difficult to believe that she had been largely ignorant of the illegal drug industry’s proliferation in this country. It is as difficult to believe that she simply closed her eyes to this while it was happening, free of any blame.

Now we are all shocked that illegal drugs use has been uncovered as a plague upon the nation, with 10 percent of our adult population dependent on them, and that the industry has become a main generator of corruption and crime in our society.

What could be a clearer indictment of an incompetent justice secretary than the fact that the Bilibid National Prison, which was under her supervision, had become not only the command center of drug lords, but also their distribution point and even manufacturing facility?

Had the extent of the illegal drug problem been disclosed during the last elections, there is no doubt de Lima would not have been elected as senator, and would have even landed in the lowest rungs. A senatorial contest for a non-incumbent senator has been estimated to cost at least P500 million. From where and how could de Lima have raised such kind of money?

In the final analysis, de Lima as senator is a fraud, having been elected on a completely false premise that she did her job as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, and if the allegations by President Duterte against her turn out to be correct, she even probably raised campaign funds from the very criminals she was supposed to put in jail. On the other hand, what value can she add to the Senate when her purported qualification for the post, that of basically being a former justice secretary, proves to be spurious?

Never before has such a sitting senator been exposed to so much public scrutiny for allegations of being a fraud. De Lima should spare the country, and herself, from such ignominy. She should scour deep in her heart to find some patriotism, and resign her post in what is often referred to in a cliché, but in a fervent wish, as the country’s august body.</s>THE Senate committee on ethics and privileges has deferred action on a complaint filed against Senator Leila de Lima by a taxpayer who wanted her expelled from the chamber.

Senator Vicente Sotto 3rd, chairman of the committee, said members of the panel were furnished copies of the complaint on Tuesday.

“We have decided to keep it confidential because it might be premature publicity. So therefore, in fairness to everyone, to all concerned, we’d rather keep it confidential,” Sotto said in an interview after the organizational meeting of the committee.

Sotto added that the panel agreed to call for a general counsel to assist them in studying the complaint.

Sotto refused to disclose details of the complaint but in an interview last week, the senator hinted that some of the issues raised by the complainant were based on the allegations of President Rodrigo Duterte, particularly on her alleged involvement in illegal drug operations and immorality.

Asked if the committee will proceed with the investigation if the allegations were based on the actions of de Lima when she was not a senator, Sotto said they will have to study the issue on jurisdiction.

“That is why it is not easy for us to just take over jurisdiction or to dismiss because of the underlying factors,” he explained.

In his two-page complaint, Abelardo de Jesus said de Lima “miserably” failed to uphold the attributes of a public officer as secretary of the Department of Justice and as a senator, which is tantamount to betrayal of public trust.

De Jesus based his complaint on the August 17, 2016 speech of the President during the 115th Police Service Anniversary in Camp Crame wherein he accused de Lima of “collecting money through her driver’ from the narco-inmates at the National Penitentiary to finance her Senate electoral campaign.

The complainant said there is no reason to doubt the veracity of the allegation, considering that it was made by no less than the President.

“Thus, I plead the Senate Ethics Committee to request the Office of the President for these evidentiary matters to warrant and justify the penalty sought to be imposed against Respondent,” de Jesus said in his complaint.

 The complaint charged de Lima with betrayal of public trust, gross misconduct, serious misrepresentation and grievous negligence.

De Jesus said de Lima should be expelled from the Senate.

Harassment

 De Lima dismissed the complaint as part of the harassment tactics against her.

“I have not seen yet any such complaint so I’d rather that I wait first for whatever action, initial or otherwise, that the ethics committee would be taking on that matter,” de Lima said.

“They’re trying to break my spirit but they will never succeed. That will not happen,” she added.

 She expressed confidence that members of the ethics panel will study the matter thoroughly.

 “I respect them as my colleagues. I know that they know what to do,” de Lima said.
Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte calls on critic senator Leila de Lima to resign and "hang herself".