of the Philippines the criminal justice system is - Article 2

It being well-nigh obvious that some elements in the military were behind the
killings of activists, it becomes equally plain that some ranking officers in the
Army (for the Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard are not herein involved), have
not performed their function of investigating or preventing the said killings,
as well as punishing their perpetrators. Under the doctrine of command
responsibility, one may be held responsible for the killings if he authorized,
encouraged, ignored or tolerated the killings.
This failure to act may perhaps be attributed to the misconception of some that
command responsibility extends only to acts which a commander orders or
authorizes, and not to criminal acts of his subordinates done on their own,
although he had knowledge or, had reason to know of, or should have known
about the same. Failure to investigate and to punish is just as inculpatory.
1. Command Responsibility defined
Contrary to the apparently inaccurate notion of command responsibility
entertained by some officers in the AFP, command responsibility in the modern
international law sense is also an omission mode of individual criminal liability
wherein the superior officer is responsible for crimes committed by his
subordinates for failing to prevent or punish them (as opposed to crimes he
ordered).
The doctrine of “command responsibility” is not unfamiliar, being a guiding
principle in military organizations. The doctrine was formalized by the Hague
Conventions IV (1907) and X (1907) and applied for the first time by the German
Supreme Court in Leipzig after World War I, in the Trial of Emil Muller.
Muller was sentenced by the Court for failing to prevent the commission of
crimes and to punish the perpetrators thereof.
The 1946 Yamashita case is a decision of the US Supreme Court which was
appealed from the Philippine Supreme Court, when the Philippines was still a
colony of the United States. The US Supreme Court convicted Yamashita as the
superior of the Japanese forces which committed unspeakable atrocities
throughout the Philippines, acts of violence, cruelty, and murder upon the
civilian population and prisoners of war, particularly a large-scale massacre of
civilians in Batangas, as well as wholesale pillage and wanton destruction of
religious monuments in the country. The US Supreme Court determined that
Yamashita possessed the duty as an army commander to control the operations
of his troops, and was criminally liable for permitting them to commit such
despicable acts. Various laws of warfare were cited as basis of such superior
responsibility: Articles 1 and 43 of the Regulations annexed to the Fourth
Hague Convention of 1907, Article 19 of the Tenth Hague Convention of 1907,
and Article 26 of the 1926 Geneva Convention on the wounded and sick. The
Court concluded that Yamashita possessed:
…an affirmative duty to take such measures as were within his power and
appropriate in the circumstances to protect prisoners of war and the civilian
population. This duty of a commanding officer has heretofore been recognized,
and its breach penalized by our own military tribunals.
In the Medina case, concerning the infamous My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, it
was held by an American Court Martial that a commander will be liable for
crimes of his subordinates when he orders a crime committed or knows that a
crime is about to be committed, has power to prevent it, and fails to exercise
that power.
After the Hague Convention, the first international treaty to comprehensively
codify the doctrine of command responsibility is the Additional Protocol I (AP
I) of 1977 to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, Article 86(2) of which states that:
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