Research\ngroup IBON will file an administrative complaint with the Office of\nthe Ombudsman on Monday to hold\ngovernment officials\naccountable for\nred-tagging the institution and many other activists, individuals and\ngroups. This is believed to be the first case of red-tagging filed\nagainst any government official in the country\u2019s history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Through\nco-complainants IBON Executive Director Sonny Africa and IBON Board\nof Trustees Chairperson Bishop Solito Toquero, an administrative\ncomplaint will be filed against former Armed Forces of the\nPhilippines (AFP) deputy chief-of-staff for civil-military operations\nand now Southern Luzon Command chief Major General Antonio Parlade,\nJr, Presidential Communications and Operations Office (PCOO)\nUndersecretary Lorraine Badoy, and National Security Adviser\nHermogenes Esperon. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
IBON\nis asking the Ombudsman to hold respondents Parlade, Badoy and\nEsperon answerable\nfor their malicious abuse of authority and negligent performance of\nduties as public officials. IBON is also asking that they be punished\nfor conduct that is grossly\ndisregardful of the public interest, unprofessional, unjust and\ninsincere, politically biased, unresponsive to the public, distorting\nnationalism and patriotism, and undemocratic.\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The\ngroup\u2019s complaint is grounded on The Ombudsman Act of 1989\n(Republic Act No. 6770) and the Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards\nfor Public Officials and Employees (Republic Act No. 6713). This is\nalso after requesting the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) to\ninvestigate the matter and participating in the CHR\u2019s subsequent\ninquiry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u2018The Chiefs\u2019 in end-January. This was after IBON Research Head Rosario Guzman fact-checked the PCOO\u2019s \u2018Duterte Legacy\u2019 information materials. Gen. Parlade meanwhile spent the first week of February in Australia calling out IBON for supposed terrorist financing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This\nvisibly started in March 2019 when Badoy and Parlade had a press\nbriefing in Malaca\u00f1ang Palace about their February 2019 red-tagging\nroad show in Europe to vilify IBON and other activists and\norganizations. They maliciously and publicly accused IBON of\n\u201cfabricated reports\u201d for the United Nations and European Union\nand \u201c[radicalizing] students as young as seven years old to\neventually become (Communist) cadres\u201d. Also in March, Esperon named\nIBON as among Philippine non-government organizations (NGOs)\nsupported by the Belgian government that \u201cact as legal fronts for\nthe CPP-NPA\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In\nthe complaint, IBON underscores how the government\u2019s crackdown on\nprogressive groups heightened following the issuance of Executive\nOrder No. 70 (EO 70) in December 2018 creating the National Task\nForce to End Local Communism and Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC). All the\nrespondents are ex-officio members of the NTF-ELCAC. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
IBON\u2019s\ncomplaint points out how the NTF-ELCAC has launched \u201ca rabid\nvilification campaign against members of civil society by arbitrarily\nand unjustly branding them as fronts of the CPP-NPA, which have been\ndeclared as \u201cterrorists\u201d by the President. The CHR, on the Sunday\nbefore IBON\u2019s filing of the complaint, also called out EO 70 as\nusing counterinsurgency to justify attacks on human rights defenders\nand activists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
IBON\nmaintains that it is nothing more than a SEC-registered foundation\nthat publishes its socio-political-economic analysis for all the\npublic to see. \u201cIts researches enjoy a reputation of being\nindependent, evidence-based, and credible. It is because of this\nreputation that its researches on social justice, real economic\ndevelopment, environmental sustainability and democracy, among many\nothers, are widely used by various non-government and people\u2019s\norganizations in pursuit of their own advocacy work,\u201d read the\ngroup\u2019s complaint.###<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The NTF-ELCAC has launched \u201ca 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 \u201cterrorists\u201d by the President<\/p>","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":9010,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_expiration-date-status":"saved","_expiration-date":0,"_expiration-date-type":"","_expiration-date-categories":[],"_expiration-date-options":[]},"categories":[2048,14],"tags":[2157,2159,2107,2158,2160,2155,2154,1487],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9009"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9009"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9009\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9012,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9009\/revisions\/9012"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}