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Rather, Human Rights Watch reports, death squads operate like this: A motorcycle pulls up, no plates. Two or three thugs hop off. They pull a weapon out of their jackets or from under their baseball caps. Sometimes it’s a knife. Sometimes it’s a .45. Whatever he carries, the thug’s aim is true – he’s trained and armed by Philippine police officers, after all. And before the blade is plunged or the trigger pulled, the guy at the wrong end of it can be reasonably sure that his name is on a list, and that the police wrote that list, and that no one is coming to save him because the list is approved from the very top.

It’s not merely the vigilantes, nor just the police, who are to blame for death-squad butchery in the Philippines. You might think that a politician would be embarrassed by the hatchet men running roughshod over his city. Not so for Duterte. His campaign platform included a pledge to throw thousands of criminals in Manila Bay. According to the self-described dictator against evil, human rights are a Western vanity. “When you start to be soft … and allow Western thoughts to seep in, that’s when you start to have problems.”

Duterte is a criminal whose life’s work is to kill all the others.

So when Duterte promised Trudeau that he would “exact justice” for Ridsdel’s death, there was little doubt that his vision of justice involves an end-run around that old nuisance, the rule of law. Just in case his meaning was somehow unclear, Duterte says he made it explicit for Trudeau during their telephone chat.