Violence, Justice, and Human Rights: Police Officers’ Convictions and Law Enforcement Practices in the Philippines

How could widespread violence stemming from law enforcement be justified from the perspective of police officers working within the framework of human rights policing? In what ways do police officers make sense of justice and violence, or authorized use of force, in implementing a campaign against illegal drugs? This paper analyzes human rights policing as a moral and political ideology from the global North and how it produces problematic and competing interpretations from various actors, such as the state administration, human rights groups, the public, and police officers in the local Philippine context. It argues that human rights, as applied to the question of violence and law enforcement, can be best viewed as a socially constructed set of principles that are hardly universal, and are rather translated and vernacularized to fit the local context (Hornberger, 2010; Gregg, 2012). The study draws insights from in-depth interviews of 40 police officers who worked as law enforcers in undercover operations, investigation and arrest missions, and the overall implementation of the Philippine war on drugs during the presidential term of Rodrigo Duterte (2016-2022). The period has notoriously spawned widespread and intense violence resulting in more than 6,000 “drug personalities” killed, based on official reports, or up to 30,000 deaths, if estimates include extra-judicial killings. The police officers’ narratives explicate their beliefs and ground practices around the themes: human rights and the rule of law, just law enforcement and use of coercive force, precarities of police work, violence and the value of human life, and the role of policing in national well-being. The paper consolidates these themes by evaluating the applicability of human rights policing to the Philippine cultural conditions that focus on criminal justice.