Karapatan assailed the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) proposed budget hike for 2025, saying that an agency whose specialty is concocting trumped-up charges against activists and other dissenters does not deserve increased fund allocations from the public coffers.
The DOJ’s proposed budget for 2025 amounts to Php 40.6 billion, a 6.3% increase from its 2024 budget of Php 38.2 billion.
Some of the latest DOJ concoctions were a ridiculous terrorist financing case against two young Southern Tagalog activists who provided Php 500.00, drinking water and food items to two newly arrested activists they had visited in a jail in Quezon province; and an equally ridiculous case alleging violation of the Anti-Terror Law against four activists–Makabayan secretary general Nathaniel Santiago, Anakpawis campaign director Servillano “Jun” Luna, Jr., ASCENT convenor and development worker Rosario Brenda Gonzalez and Bulacan Ecumenical Forum volunteer lay worker Anasusa San Gabriel. The case stems from unfounded allegations that the respondents participated in an armed encounter between the New People’s Army and the 84th Infantry Battalion of the Philippine Army in Barangay San Fernando, Laur, Nueva Ecija on October 8, 2023.
To date, more than a hundred activists have faced complaints or court charges of violating the ATA and/or the law on terrorist financing, courtesy of the cabal of case manufacturers led by DOJ Secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla.
On top of manufacturing such cases, the DOJ has also been inutile in its purported mandate of dispensing justice, as proven in its junking of the cases against the killers of Bloody Sunday victims Manny Asuncion and couple Ariel and Anna Mariz Evangelista.
The Marcos Jr. government should correct its distorted sense of values by pouring monies instead into much more worthy programs under special human rights laws addressing human trafficking, violence against women and children and crimes against humanity, among others, none of which merited a single centavo under the proposed 2025 budget.