PHILIPPINE President Rodrigo Duterte lashed out yesterday at another UN human rights expert for making critical remarks about his role in the expulsion of the country’s chief justice, telling him “to go to hell.”

Mr Duterte dismissed the remarks of Diego Garcia-Sayan and told him not to meddle in domestic problems.

“Tell him not to interfere with the affairs of my country. He can go to hell,” Duterte said in a late-night televised news conference. “He is not a special person and I do not recognise his rapporteur title.”

Mr Garcia-Sayan had told reporters in Manila on Thursday that the unprecedented ousting of Maria Lourdes Sereno as chief justice after Mr Duterte lambasted her in public is an attack on judicial independence that could put Philippine democracy at risk.

Mr Duterte has reacted with similar public outbursts in the past against other UN rapporteurs who raised alarm and sought an independent investigation into his bloody “anti-drug” campaign, in which police have killed thousands of mostly poor people.

Ms Sereno’s ouster has generated “a climate of intimidation” in the 15-member Supreme Court and other levels of the judiciary, Mr Garcia-Sayan said.

He said that, while there was not a formal UN investigation into the matter, it was comparable to the Polish government’s attempts to stack the judiciary, about which Mr Garcia-Sayan is due to publish a report.

Ms Sereno was expelled by an 8-6 vote on a petition filed by Solicitor General Jose Calida, who accused her of failing to file asset disclosures as a university law professor years ago, which she denies. It pre-empted impeachment proceedings against her that were then under way in Congress.