News Roundup 20 November 2022
Nov 20, 2022 • 5 min Read
Philippines shuns UN calls to legalize same-sex marriage | PHILSTAR.COM – The Philippines has ignored calls from a United Nations body to legalize same-sex marriage and enact other pieces of legislation that seek to protect the members of the LGBT community from discrimination and allow divorce in the country. Such recommendations from other UN member-states during last week’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) in Geneva were “not acceptable”, Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla said in his radio program on Saturday. The Philippines has the largest Catholic population in Asia. At the same time, Remulla said the country also rejected proposals to allow abortion and divorce and enact the SOGIE bill, which seeks to protect the members of LGBT community from discrimination. “They want the SOGIE Bill for same-sex marriage to have the same as in their countries. So, that’s not acceptable for us. They really want a lot to be implemented here,” Remulla said in Filipino. He led the country’s delegation to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) meeting last week. “Divorce, even though we want it, needs thorough discussion, given that ours is a Catholic nation,” he added. While there are city ordinances that protect the rights of the gay community, activists have expressed concern that the absence of an anti-discrimination legislation for LGBTs and stiff opposition from religious groups and conservative senators could offset any progress made at the local level. Meanwhile, an opinion poll in 2018 showed 53% of adult Filipinos agreed that married couples who have already separated and can no longer reconcile should be allowed to divorce so they can legally get married again.
Public must join outrage over intel funds – Pimentel | INQUIRER.NET – Senate Minority Leader Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel III called on the public to oppose the allocation of hundreds of millions of pesos in confidential and intelligence funds (CIF) to agencies not responsible for national security or law enforcement as the country watches government spending while grappling with a ballooning national debt. In a radio interview on Saturday, Pimentel said the formation of a Senate oversight committee on CIF cannot justify such funding in the national budget to agencies like the Department of Education (DepEd) that do not have the mandate to conduct surveillance work and intelligence gathering. Pimentel, with help from fellow opposition Sen. Risa Hontiveros, was hopeful that they would get enough votes from other senators to back his move to delete the proposed confidential funds—mainly the P500 million for the office of Vice President Sara Duterte and the P150 million for DepEd also headed by Duterte. “We hope (fellow lawmakers will join us), especially once they feel the mounting public pressure that the people are now alarmed why we are giving P500 million in confidential funds for the OVP (Office of Vice President) and another P150 million for the DepEd,” he said. Pimentel said the ordinary Filipino taxpayers should also question the propriety of appropriating confidential and intelligence funds to agencies with no clear mandate to use them.“This is the time our people should now take part, first by understanding what confidential funds are,” he added. One of the main features of such funds is that they are not audited in the same transparent way that funds of other agencies are, making them open to misuse, abuse and corruption. At a budget hearing in the House of Representatives in September, opposition Rep. Edcel Lagman questioned the refusal by the Commission on Audit (COA) to disclose details of the use of confidential funds, including liquidation reports. Lagman warned that if the postaudit was “covered by secrecy and not disclosed to this very House that appropriates funds, that makes the audit more imaginary and possibly not being done seriously and effectively.” Last week, he called for a purge of “unnecessary, excessive” CIFs, saying that “no stretch of the imagination or flexibility of logic” could justify P9.3 billion for confidential and intelligence spending by several government agencies. These funds are “shrouded in mystery” and the COA itself could not disclose to the Congress and the public how these are used, the Albay representative said.
BuCor to tear down concrete barriers along NBP roads | INQUIRER.NET – Gregorio Catapang, the officer in charge of the Bureau of Corrections (BuCor), will tear down the control gates erected during the time of his suspended predecessor Gerald Bantag and allow people, especially students, to go to their destinations within the 104-hectare New Bilibid Prison (NBP) reservation unhampered. For Catapang, the control gates — which were previously reported to be concrete walls in the middle of the NBP roads — were a violation of the public’s constitutional right to “freedom of movement.” “I will restore access to people, because people should really be able to move without sacrificing the security of the [NBP] camp,” he said in a television interview on Thursday. In March last year, Bantag had a control gate erected on Insular Prison Road, which impeded the access of residents of Southville 3, a housing project of the National Housing Authority, to and from the city’s Barangay Poblacion. Eight months later, in November, BuCor again put up a gate on University Road which also restricted the movement of residents of Katarungan Village 1 and 2, a housing project of the Department of Justice. Heeding residents’ complaints, the city government protested the control gates, arguing that they were built without consultation with the local government or city residents. But Bantag insisted they were built for “security reasons,” noting that it should have been put up 15 years ago. Catapang, a career security official who retired in 2015 as chief of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, said possible security threats could be “minimized if there are systems in place,” even if civilians were allowed access again to the NBP roads.
