Cebu’s Red-tagged NGO asks gov’t to stop harassment as trial looms
CEBU CITY—“Stop fabricating charges.”
This was the appeal of a Cebu-based nongovernment organization (NGO) to the government as 24 of its members faced trial on Feb. 4 for allegedly providing financial and logistical services to communist rebels.
In a statement, the Community Empowerment Resource Network Inc. (Cernet) said the Philippine government wants to exit from the gray list of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a global network against money laundering and terrorist financing, at the expense of NGOs and its members.
“NGOs are not terrorists or terrorist financiers. Running after or attacking civil society organizations doing humanitarian work diminishes the trust of the people in government,” said lawyer Ian Vincent Manticajon, spokesperson for Cernet, in the statement released on Friday.
In May 2024, the Department of Justice ordered the filing of charges in court against 27 members of Cernet for violating Republic Act No. 10168, or the Terrorism Financing Prevention and Suppression Act of 2012.
Three of the accused, however, were already dead at the time the complaint was lodged by the government’s National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-Elcac) last year, bringing the number of the accused to 24.
Each of the accused posted a bail of P200,000 to secure temporary liberty while the case was being heard.
Cebu City Regional Trial Court Branch 74 Judge Marlon Jay Moneva, who handles the case, has set the first trial against the Cernet members on Feb. 4.
Persecution
Those named in the complaint were accused of allegedly delivering P135,000 to the South Eastern Front group of the National People’s Army (NPA) in Dumaguete City in Negros Oriental province in 2012.
According to the Visayas Command of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, Cernet, which was registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission as a nonprofit organization, has long been utilized by the Communist Party of the Philippines and its military arm, the NPA, as an alleged front for its fund generation scheme since 2001.
Lawyer Estrella Catarata, one of the accused in the case, denied the allegations, saying they were never involved in any move to support the communist group and that the filing of a complaint against them was a form of persecution to vilify the cause and mission of the organization.
“We call on FATF to closely examine the supposed compliance of the Philippine government and check on deficiencies in countering big time money laundering and terrorist financing,” she said.
She added, “The compliance effort is mainly a show of statistics of baseless cases filed against legal civic organizations and human rights defenders.”
Cernet, which is based in Cebu City and active in the Visayas, works alongside marginalized groups to promote economic, social and cultural rights in their communities by providing small project funds to grassroots initiatives.
The group said they support the FATF objectives and the government’s efforts to counter terrorism but these should be done by respecting human rights.
Cernet said it has been studying the filing of counter charges against state forces that hurled baseless accusations against its members.
“Is the case against Cernet part of the government’s quota in the number of terrorist financing cases that has to be filed to exit from the FATF list. Or is it because of the NTF-Elcac’s paranoia against the NPAs that NGOs, even if only delivering humanitarian services to marginalized communities, have to be targeted?” the group said.
