Research
group IBON will file an administrative complaint with the Office of
the Ombudsman on Monday to hold
government officials
accountable for
red-tagging the institution and many other activists, individuals and
groups. This is believed to be the first case of red-tagging filed
against any government official in the country’s history.
Through
co-complainants IBON Executive Director Sonny Africa and IBON Board
of Trustees Chairperson Bishop Solito Toquero, an administrative
complaint will be filed against former Armed Forces of the
Philippines (AFP) deputy chief-of-staff for civil-military operations
and now Southern Luzon Command chief Major General Antonio Parlade,
Jr, Presidential Communications and Operations Office (PCOO)
Undersecretary Lorraine Badoy, and National Security Adviser
Hermogenes Esperon.
IBON
is asking the Ombudsman to hold respondents Parlade, Badoy and
Esperon answerable
for their malicious abuse of authority and negligent performance of
duties as public officials. IBON is also asking that they be punished
for conduct that is grossly
disregardful of the public interest, unprofessional, unjust and
insincere, politically biased, unresponsive to the public, distorting
nationalism and patriotism, and undemocratic.
The
group’s complaint is grounded on The Ombudsman Act of 1989
(Republic Act No. 6770) and the Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards
for Public Officials and Employees (Republic Act No. 6713). This is
also after requesting the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) to
investigate the matter and participating in the CHR’s subsequent
inquiry.
IBON said that the complaint was written after a year of constant vilification of it by the respondents. The most recent, mentioned in the complaint, is when Usec. Badoy called IBON a communist front on the One News program ‘The Chiefs’ in end-January. This was after IBON Research Head Rosario Guzman fact-checked the PCOO’s ‘Duterte Legacy’ information materials. Gen. Parlade meanwhile spent the first week of February in Australia calling out IBON for supposed terrorist financing.
The complaint enumerates numerous slanderous statements, interviews, articles, and speeches in 2019 and the first weeks of 2020 where Badoy, Parlade, and Esperon red-tagged IBON.
This
visibly started in March 2019 when Badoy and Parlade had a press
briefing in Malacañang Palace about their February 2019 red-tagging
road show in Europe to vilify IBON and other activists and
organizations. They maliciously and publicly accused IBON of
“fabricated reports” for the United Nations and European Union
and “[radicalizing] students as young as seven years old to
eventually become (Communist) cadres”. Also in March, Esperon named
IBON as among Philippine non-government organizations (NGOs)
supported by the Belgian government that “act as legal fronts for
the CPP-NPA”
The complaint points out that IBON formally wrote the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and National Security Council (NSC), as well as had a meeting with the latter, to ask for the so-called evidence for the allegations. However, despite repeated requests, the AFP and NSC have refused to provide anything while purportedly showing these to media, diplomats, government agencies, and even private sector groups.
In
the complaint, IBON underscores how the government’s crackdown on
progressive groups heightened following the issuance of Executive
Order No. 70 (EO 70) in December 2018 creating the National Task
Force to End Local Communism and Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC). All the
respondents are ex-officio members of the NTF-ELCAC.
IBON’s
complaint points out how the NTF-ELCAC has launched “a rabid
vilification campaign against members of civil society by arbitrarily
and unjustly branding them as fronts of the CPP-NPA, which have been
declared as “terrorists” by the President. The CHR, on the Sunday
before IBON’s filing of the complaint, also called out EO 70 as
using counterinsurgency to justify attacks on human rights defenders
and activists.
IBON
maintains that it is nothing more than a SEC-registered foundation
that publishes its socio-political-economic analysis for all the
public to see. “Its researches enjoy a reputation of being
independent, evidence-based, and credible. It is because of this
reputation that its researches on social justice, real economic
development, environmental sustainability and democracy, among many
others, are widely used by various non-government and people’s
organizations in pursuit of their own advocacy work,” read the
group’s complaint.###