Philippines won’t quit UN rights council or sever ties with Iceland despite Duterte’s threat: Locsin
- Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jnr dismissed the UN vote to investigate President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs as ‘a small and harmless matter’
- However, he singled out Iceland, the country which tabled the draft resolution, as ‘a nation of women beaters and eugenicists’
On Twitter, Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jnr wrote “we will stay in the HRC out of duty to teach those whose awful history cries out for moral instruction how to avoid the hypocrisy that is the tribute vice pays to the virtue they so sorely lacked”. Locsin, who previously served as the Philippines’ ambassador to the UN, dismissed last week’s HRC vote as “a small and harmless matter”.
“We’re not severing diplomatic relations with any country,” he wrote. “If we did, where’s the conversation? How do you insult those who insulted us if you cut them off?
“How are we to continue to upbraid a nation of women beaters and eugenicists if we cut off the conversation. No, we must continue it. Many infant lives at stake here; not to mention women beaten up in the long nights of Iceland. It is a moral duty to continue the conversation.”
“It was necessary, in our opinion, because all reports indicate that the human rights situation in the Philippines continues to deteriorate,” said Gudlaugur Thór Thórdarson, Minister for Foreign Affairs.
