The United Nations yesterday affirmed another national embarrassment under President Arroyo after it released yesterday an updated report stating that the Armed Forces of the Philippines has been executing leftist activists in recent years.

Philip Alston, special rapporteur on extra-judicial, summary or arbitrary executions of the UN, lamented in the report that not a single soldier has been convicted for extra-judicial killings.

The new report released at the UN on Monday (Tuesday in Manila), said leftist militants have been the targets of operations of the military.

“A significant number of the hundreds of extra-judicial executions of leftist activists in the Philippines that have taken place over the past six years are the result of deliberate targeting by the military as part of counter-insurgency operations against the communist rebels,” Alston said.

While he welcomed the Arroyo government’s initiative to address the problem, the UN official stressed the need to end impunity through prosecution and punishment.

In a statement, Alston said he was “encouraged” by various measures adopted recently by the government and by the fact that he had met with Executive Secretary

he had met with Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita in New York last October.

But he emphasized that those responsible for killings must be prosecuted and punished to stop them.

“The government has undertaken a range of welcome reforms, but the fact remains that not a single soldier has been convicted in any of the cases involving leftist activists,” Alston said.

In a 10-day fact-finding mission to the Philippines in January, Alston made an in-depth investigation of the killings where he interviewed victims or witnesses to 57 incidents involving 96 extra-judicial executions.

He met with government officials of all ranks, including local military commanders, President Arroyo, with the leaders of the communist rebels’ National Democratic Front (NDF).

“In some parts of the country, the Armed Forces have followed a deliberate strategy of systematically hunting down the leaders of leftist organization,” Alston noted. “As commander-in-chief, the President must take concrete steps to end such operations.”

Since 1968, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) – which has an armed faction, the New People’s Army (NPA), and a civil society group, the NDF – has aimed to revolutionize what it views as the country’s “semi-feudal” society.

Alston said that the military officers he interviewed “relentlessly pushed” the theory that such extra-judicial executions had in fact been committed by the rebels to simultaneously remove spies while discrediting the government, and he reviewed all of the documentation provided to support this idea.

“The military’s argument that the leftist activists who have been killed are the victims of a ‘purge’ by the rebels is strikingly unconvincing and can only be viewed as a cynical attempt to displace responsibility,” he said.

Alston also criticized the rebels themselves for participating in some extra-judicial executions of civilians who are not directly involved with the hostilities and the death threats they have made against political opponents.

“The death sentences imposed by their ‘people’s courts’ provide only a veneer of legality for what is really vigilantism or murder,” he said.

During his visit to the Philippines, Alston also investigated extra-judicial executions in western Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago, which have seen armed conflict involving several insurgent and terrorist groups, including the Moro National Liberation Front, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and the Abu Sayyaf Group.

Since witnesses in the regions live in great fear and it is difficult to ascertain who is responsible for abuses, he said that bolstered human rights monitoring is crucial to protect the civilian population.

The rapporteur also looked into the actions of a death squad in Davao City, interviewing victims and witnesses as well as speaking with local police, military officers and the mayor.

“The mayor’s position that he can do nothing to stop men without masks from routinely killing children for petty crimes in full view of witnesses lacks all credibility,” he said in the report.

“Mayor (Rodrigo) Duterte should be stripped of his control over the local police, and the national government should assume responsibility for dismantling the death squad and prosecuting its members,” Alston said.