PHL lost P3.2B in foreign loans from countries seeking UN probe on drug war —DOF chief

The Philippines lost P3.2 billion in foreign loans, including P2 billion for climate change initiatives as President Rodrigo Duterte suspend the negotiations and implementation of agreements covering grants and loans from 18 countries that backed a United Nations (UN) investigation on the administration's war on illegal drugs, Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez said Wednesday.

“Yes, these are suspended while the relationship [between the Philippines and the donor countries] are being examined,” Dominguez told the Senate Committee on Finance during a budget briefing.

A €21-million or P1.2-billion loan from France, to fund the Bus Rapid Transit program of the Department of Transportation, was suspended as well as the $46-million or P2-billion loan from Germany for climate change studies.

“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. As to the 46 million US dollars from Germany, we are still looking for a substitute,” Dominguez noted.

The probe into the Duterte administration’s bloody campaign against illegal drugs was initiated by Iceland in a resolution which the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council adopted last July 11 after an 18-14 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 are contradicting 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.

Long before the President issued the memo suspending the flow of aid from nations in favor of or have sponsored Iceland’s resolution, the Duterte administration had been instituting policies to ensure that donor countries do not hold the country hostage, Dominguez noted.

“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,” Dominguez 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,” he added. —VDS, GMA News