AFTER Congress moved to defund the Commission on Human Rights with just a budget of P1,000, President Rodrigo Duterte on Monday vowed to leave it hanging as long as his top critic, chairperson Jose Luis Martin “Chito” Gascon, stayed in the agency.
“We’re not abolishing the Human Rights Commission, but they’ll stand by as long as Gascon is there,” Duterte told reporters in a chance interview in Caloocan City.
He also said he would invite the UN’s Human Rights Commission to set up a satellite office in the country, since the CHR would be practically useless.
Amid Gascon’s call for the President to “elevate the level of discourse,” he said in a separate speech that he never accused Gascon of being a pedophile “just for fun.”
In the House of Representatives, at least three lawmakers defended their decision to support the P1,000 budget for the CHR.
Party-List Reps. Eugene de Vera of ABS party-list, Anthony Bravo of Coop Natcco and Aniceto Bertiz III of Acts-OFW, at a news conference Monday, said it was only proper for the Commission headed by Chito Gascon to get a miniscule budget for not performing its functions as guardians against all forms of abuses involving civil and political rights.
The three lawmakers were among the 119 House members who supported the motion of SAGIP party-list Rep. Rodante to reduce the 2018 CHR’s proposed P678 million to P1,000.
“I stood by my vote to slash the CHR budget for [sic] P1,000. We have reviewed the performance of the Commission and we believe it fails to do its mandate,” De Vera said.
A case in point cited by De Vera was the “lag-lag bala” incident involving an overseas Filipino worker named Gloria Ortinez who fell victim to the bullet-planting racket at the Ninoy Aquino International Airpot in 2015.
De Vera said the CHR had been silent about this issue which victimized many individuals.
Bravo said the CHR must investigate all forms of human rights violations regardless of political color or political affiliations.
He also slammed the CHR’s alleged partisanship in dealing with cases of alleged summary killings.
“The P1,000 does mean the amount was the value of human rights but the fact that the CHR is not performing its mandate to guard against all abuses,” Bravo said.
Bertiz, for his part, echoed a similar complaint against the CHR –which was also silent on the alleged abuses involving his party-list sector’s overseas Filipino workers.
“We have never felt the support of the CHR to the OFW sector,” Bertiz said.
Earlier, Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez demanded the resignation of all CHR officials, including Gascon, if the Commission would want to restore its millions of peso budget.
Alvarez said the Commission did not deserve to be allocated a huge amount for protecting only the rights of criminal syndicates.
In a speech in Davao City last weekend, Duterte accused Gascon, a former director-general for the opposition Liberal Party from 2008 to 2011, of being partisan in doing his functions as CHR chair and told him to call for his ouster.
The President likewise asked the human rights chief if he was a pedophile because of his “fixation” on the teenage victims of killings.
Gascon was appointed by then President Benigno Aquino III as CHR chairperson in 2015 and has a seven-year term ending in 2022.
Duterte reiterated his calls for Congress to realign the budget taken away from CHR to buy body cameras for policemen, facing greater scrutiny in the government’s bloody drug crackdown.
“Nobody from the police will operate without a camera. If it pushes through, it will be strictly followed and media is free to cover,” Duterte said.