MANILA: A senior Malacanang Palace official on Sunday vowed the Duterte administration is determined to pursue a “more expansive view of human rights” to improve the lives of the vulnerable sectors of society especially the poor.

Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea pointed out these human rights programmes are part of government efforts to help and alleviate the plight of the millions of marginalized Filipinos.

These include, Medialdea said, women, children, persons with disability, the elderly, indigenous peoples (known as “lumads”), migrant workers and communities in crisis due to disasters.

He explained: “We acknowledge those programmes not only as individual agency initiatives but a collective undertaking to provide human rights as a means by which government effectively responds to the (needs) of the country’s vulnerable sectors.”

Medialdea, the chairman of the Presidential Human Rights Committee, issued a message as the country joined the rest of the world on Sunday to observe International Human Rights Day.

President Rodrigo “Rody” Duterte has been under heavy fire from local and foreign human rights advocates for alleged rampant abuses, particularly extra-judicial killings (EJKs) arising from the bloody and violent war on illegal drugs and criminality.

But in particular, the Philippine National Police (PNP) has vehemently denied the government was not state-sponsored and thus, not behind the EJKs and blamed instead vigilante groups for the alarming increase in such killings.

Also on Sunday, militant groups mounted protest rallies near Malacanang Palace, the official residence of the president, in Manila to condemn alleged human rights abuses by the Duterte administration.

The protesters lit candles beside the mock corpses of EJK victims in the war on drugs as well as denounced moves to extend martial law in Mindanao and Duterte’s declaration of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its armed component the New People’s Army (NPA) as “terrorist organizations.”

Before the declaration, Duterte earlier signed a proclamation formally cancelling the government’s peace talks with the communists in Oslo, Norway which has been brokering the negotiations.