Drilon urges Senate leadership to tackle bill criminalizing ‘red-tagging’

Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon on Thursday urged the chamber's leadership to tackle the bill he filed which seeks to criminalize “red-tagging.”

“I have filed an anti-red tagging bill, criminalizing and punishing this practice. I urge the Senate leadership to hear this bill as soon as possible,” Drilon said in a text message shared to reporters.

His call came amid the linking of community pantry organizers to communist movements.

In March, Drilon filed Senate Bill 2121 which provides definition to red-tagging and make it punishable by up to 10 years in prison as deterrence “in order to fix the legal gaps, address impunity, and institutionalize a system of accountability.”

Under his bill, the crime of “red-tagging” is defined as the act of labeling, vilifying, branding, naming, accusing, harassing, persecuting, stereotyping, or caricaturing individuals, groups, or organizations as state enemies, left-leaning, subversives, communists, or terrorists as part of a counter-insurgency or anti-terrorism strategy or program, by any state actor, such as law enforcement agent, paramilitary, or military personnel.

Earlier, the Senate national defense panel earlier came out with a report on its inquiry into incidents of “red-tagging,” which said that there is no need for a new law to penalize “red-tagging” as there were enough provisions under other judicial remedies for such cases.

But in April, Senate President Vicente Sotto III said he is now inclined to support the measure seeking to criminalize “red-tagging” after the Senate employees’ union was accused of having links with communist rebels.

Drilon likewise called on President Rodrigo Duterte to realign the budget of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) under the 2021 national budget.

Drilon joined his other colleagues’ call to defund the anti-insurgency task force due to the recent red-tagging of community pantry organizers.

“[W]e do not have to wait for the 2022 budget debates to defund NTF-ELCAC. The President should realign the NTF-ELCAC under the 2021 [General Appropriations Act] now. Now na!! Because as the saying goes: ‘Aanhin mo pa ang damo kung patay na [ang] kabayo?’” Drilon said.

Sotto, however, earlier nixed such proposal.

Instead, he suggested to replace the officials who released “irresponsible statements.”

Drilon was among the senators who opposed the P19-billion appropriations to the NTF-ELCAC during the Senate budget deliberations, arguing it was “clearly a lump sum pork barrel of Malacañang disguised as anti-insurgency funds.”

“The [bicameral conference committee] junked my amendment. For the past weeks, I have been urging the President to realign the anti-insurgency budget to fund the budgeted “ayuda” to the poor. I am glad that my colleagues joined me in that call,” he said. — RSJ, GMA News