Rights group insists junking of confidential, intelligence funds

Human rights alliance Karapatan on Friday renewed its call to government to junk the Confidential and Intelligence Funds (CIF) after resource persons at congressional hearings bared Vice President Sara Duterte ordered her Special Disbursement Officer to turn over more than P200 million in CIF of the Office of the Vice President and the Department of Education (DepEd) to ranking officials of her security group.

 “Hundreds of millions of pesos of Duterte’s CIF ended up in the hands of military men,” deplored Karapatan secretary general Cristina Palabay.  “With the former regime’s war on drugs utilizing a reward system funded by CIF monies, there is ample reason to believe that the same reward system operated within the military to bankroll the surveillance, extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances and other human rights violations perpetrated against activists, human rights defenders and other dissenters,” she fumed.

Palabay further denounced that, “a report by the Commission on Audit (COA) has already revealed that part of Sara Duterte’s CIF also went to the rental and maintenance of safehouse,” adding, “these safehouses may be serving as secret prisons prohibited under the Anti-Desaparecido Act of 2012, where victims of enforced disappearance are being arbitrarily detained, interrogated, tortured or even killed extrajudicially.”

“And the funds spent for the so-called purchase of information may well have been reward monies given to bogus witnesses who gave perjured testimonies to enable the filing of trumped-up charges against activists, development workers and other human rights defenders,” Palabay added.

Karapatan believed, “the opaque nature of the confidential and intelligence funds which shields them from public scrutiny compounds the fact that the funds have undoubtedly been used for evil purposes, not to mention the fact that they are a ready source of corruption.”

The human rights group also denounced that aside from the CIF of the OVP and DepEd, “billions have been spent and allotted for the Office of the President, with PhP 4.5 billion this year and PhP10.2 billion for 2025.” 

“The CIF,” Palabay further emphasized, “is simply the old pork barrel in different garb since its ‘confidentiality’ generally puts it beyond the purview of state auditors. This means,” she added, “that Ferdinand Marcos Jr. will not be held accountable for the disposition of such a huge amount.”

Palabay likewise noted that the OP’s P4.5-billion allotment in 2024 still does not include the P100 million allocated for the National Security Council, the P300 million allocated for the National Intelligence and Security Agency, and the P8 billion allocated for the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC).

In reality, said Palabay, “the Office of the President actually has Php12.9 billion at its disposal, all for ‘confidential’ and intelligence purposes, and all unprogrammed and beyond public scrutiny.”

“This is Php12.9 billion for the red-tagging and surveillance of dissenters, for psywar operations, including orchestrated social media attacks to vilify activists and for black operations to abduct, forcibly disappear or extrajudicially kill them,” said Palabay. “This is Php12.9 billion to suppress dissent and wage war on the Filipino people.