By Raymund Antonio Vice President Leni Robredo reaffirmed her commitment to pursue what she called the “real struggle” in the campaign against human rights abuses under the Duterte administration. Vice President Leni Robredo
(Facebook / Manila Bulletin) “When I say it’s real, there’s been so many roadblocks as far as the fight for human rights is concerned, and those roadblocks, we’ve …not allowed them to constrain us in what we’re doing,” Robredo said. “But you know, we’ve been looking for avenues to... if you know what I mean, to be more creative. And I think the crucial thing here is that we can’t give up. We have to continue doing the pushback,” she added. This was Robredo’s reply to a question at a forum in London School of Economics and Political Science, where she was asked about the human rights situation in the Philippines linked to the government’s war on drugs. The Vice President groped for answers at first as she was mindful of the backlash her statement may cause. One of the international students asked Robredo if “there is anything at all that the Vice President’s office can do in order to stop the killings.” “Human rights. Uhm…,” Robredo responded at the forum, a transcript of which was sent to Manila-based reporters. She elicited laughter from the audience. Robredo had become circumspect during the forum in her statements, careful not to antagonize President Rodrigo Duterte. The Vice President admitted she “struggled with words” because she didn’t want people would “shift the focus on real issues” to her supposed ambition to replace the President. “There has been a lot of debate on how many people have been killed. I made a statement before the UN before, which put me in a lot of hot water, just because of the number of people who have died,” she said. “But you know, what is sad about this is that one death is one death too many, but the debate has shifted to ‘It’s not 12,000. It’s just 3,000. It’s just 3,000.’ And 3,000 deaths is 3,000 deaths too many,” the Vice President explained. “I was a human rights lawyer for a long time and the way we’re doing things before, it seems that they are not working now. So it’s been a struggle. And the struggle is real,” she said. Robredo, a lawyer, has been very vocal against human rights violations, particularly extrajudicial killings amid the ongoing drug war in the country. She resigned as chair of the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council in 2016 because of her criticisms of Duterte’s war on drugs. Speaking at the forum, Robredo acknowledged it would “take a lot of innovativeness and more imagination” to promote human rights. “We’ve been very active with groups promoting rehabilitation as an alternative means of fighting the war on drugs. We’ve been advocating to look at it from the point of view of health. I wouldn’t say that we’ve been successful already; as long as the killings continue, then we’re still unsuccessful,” she said. “We’re trying to be creative... we’re trying to be very creative in the way we’re doing things, but still it’s there,” the Vice President added.