The Philippines lost P3.2 billion in foreign loans as President Rodrigo Duterte suspended deals with 18 countries that backed a United Nations investigation on his administration’s war on illegal drugs, Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez admitted Wednesday.
During a budget briefing with the Senate Committee on Finance, Dominguez said: “Yes, these are suspended while the relationship [between the Philippines and the donor countries] are being examined.”
The lost amount includes P2 billion for climate change initiatives, as President Duterte halted the negotiations and implementation of agreements covering grants and loans from the nations that backed the UN probe on the drug war.
They include a 21-million euro (P1.2-billion) loan from France to fund the Bus Rapid Transit program of the Department of Transportation and the $46-million (P2 billion) loan from Germany for climate change studies, which Dominguez said they are looking for a substitute.
“The 21 million euros from France … we already found a substitute for that. It would be a soft loan, and we can get very similar terms from another multilateral agency,” he noted.
Long before the President issued a memorandum suspending the flow of aid from nations in favor of the probe on the local drug war, Dominguez said the Duterte administration had been instituting policies to ensure that donor countries do not hold the country hostage.
“In 2019, the European Union offered us a grant and they said if you will not behave, we will take this back. We did not accept that. We are not working on that policy anymore,” he said.
“We should have the right to cancel the grant. So we said, the wording should be, we will give this to you until such time that it will be illegal for us to give it to you, and they agreed,” the finance chief added.
The probe into the Duterte administration’s bloody campaign against illegal drugs was initiated by Iceland in a resolution which the UN Human Rights Council adopted last July 11 after an 18-14 vote during it 41st regular session in Geneva, Switzerland.
Based on government figures, more than 5,000 people have been killed during police operations under the war against drugs.
However, local and international human rights groups contradict the official figures, claiming that the number of victims is around 20,000 since the police report does include those killed outside police operations.
A group of human rights lawyers led by the Free Legal Assistance Group has questioned the legality of the drug war before the Supreme Court, but the high court has yet to rule on the petition.
The lawyers claimed that the documents submitted by the police were rubbish since details of non-drug related operations were included.
