The Philippines is finally off the world’s financial “gray list,” which for years, has been said to limit trade and transactions for Filipinos. But there is growing concern that persecuting human rights defenders was — and will be — used by the Philippine government to keep this status.
The Philippines was put on the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) gray list in 2021, which branded the country as being unable to stop or track illicit financial flows — whether in terrorism or dirty money — through scams and illegal gambling.
The government wanted to be taken off that list by 2024, but failed in its bid in light of money laundering red flags from casino junkets, which are connected to scandals involving Philippine offshore gaming operators (POGOs).
At the opening of 2025 – we were off that list, but how? Did we solve our money laundering problems? Did we solve our terrorism problems? According to the human rights community, it’s because the government filed a slew of terror-financing cases against human rights defenders and progressive nongovernment organizations or NGOs.
“Philippine authorities appear to be stepping up terrorism financing prosecutions to get off of FATF’s ‘grey list’ and its potential financial cost. This seems to be the government’s latest bad reason to bring baseless charges against civil society groups and activists in violation of their rights,” Bryony Lau, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), said in a statement.
There was a 371% increase in terror financing complaints filed by the government in 2024, said the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers (NUPL) and the Council for People’s Development and Governance (CPDG).
“These criminal charges target officers and members of people’s organizations and their networks engaged in human rights and disaster-preparedness training, agrarian reform advocacy, environmental protection, and the delivery of humanitarian and development aid in conflict areas,” said the NUPL Panay chapter in a statement.
The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) obtained a police memorandum about a case buildup for terror financing against an activist. The memorandum, which came from a regional chief of the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group, referenced the operation to “Project ‘Exit the Greylist.'”
The group of human rights lawyers also criticized the FATF for not involving civil society organizations (CSOs) in its processes, calling the intergovernmental body potentially “disastrous for the people of those countries” it reviews.
“FATF recommendations lack human rights and humanitarian safeguards that could effectively restrain authoritarian abuse,” said NUPL Panay.
The problem with the FATF
The FATF was established in 1989 by the G7 countries — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. It has grown into a body of 40 members, with 200 countries committing to be measured by its standards, and pledging to implement recommendations.
It’s mandate, in simple terms, is to protect the world from money laundering and terrorism financing. Countries take the FATF list seriously because they can then use it as leverage for their trade and other transactions.
Malacañang said this latest “milestone” benefits Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), which projects the FATF as a universally-accepted glowing standard for financial systems.
But in the global human rights community, FATF has been flagged for years now as a potential tool of repressive governments.
“The Task Force lent a veneer of legitimacy to States that, without due respect for their international human rights obligations, turned soft law to hard law by implementing the provisions of recommendation through wholesale measures that strictly regulate civil society,” said the 2019 report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism.
In 2021, a Reuters investigation found that in countries like Uganda, Serbia, India, Tanzania, and Nigeria, FATF recommendations were used as justification to pass laws that, in turn, were used to investigate journalists and human rights defenders.
In 2023, FATF responded to these criticisms by revising one of its recommendations (‘Recommendation 8’) so that it now advised countries to think of “proportionate and risk-based measures” in investigating NGOs it suspected to be terrorism conduits.
But for HRW, the damage has been done because the Philippine government has already drafted its 2023-2027 national strategy against money laundering and terrorism financing.
The result of the strategy was, as HRW said, the prosecution by government using testimonies of alleged rebel defectors — “the same flimsy evidence that the military and the police have long used in politically motivated prosecutions of leftist human rights, environmental, and Indigenous activists, religious workers, journalists, and others.”
“FATF should not stay silent while the government is misusing its terrorism financing recommendations to harass civil society groups and activists,” HRW’s Lau said. – Rappler.com