GENEVA — Reports of thousands of people killed by the police in the Philippine government’s crackdown on drug use are “alternative facts,” a Filipino senator and ally of President Rodrigo Duterte said on Monday, brushing off accusations of extrajudicial killings as a way to discredit Mr. Duterte.

The senator, Alan Peter Cayetano, told a session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva that statistics collected by human rights observers have mischaracterized all homicides in the Philippines as extrajudicial killings, “which is simply untrue.” Western governments and human rights observers have expressed deep concern over police and vigilante killings of people suspected of being drug users at the behest of Mr. Duterte.

At least 7,000 people, mostly urban poor, have been killed in a brutal campaign to crack down on illegal drug use in the Philippines since Mr. Duterte took office last year, Human Rights Watch said in a statement on Monday to coincide with the council session. It recalled Mr. Duterte’s statement last August in which he said: “My order is to shoot to kill you. I don’t care about human rights, you better believe me.”

Some Filipino activists put the number of people killed in brutal drive-by shootings and police raids much higher. “It’s getting worse. There’s not a single night when there’s no killing,” said Ciriaco Santiago, a Redemptorist missionary who documents deaths in Manila, the capital. He said the city has an average of about 1,000 killings a month.