… There’s a man goin’ ’round takin’ names
And he decides who to free and who to blame
Everybody won’t be treated all the same
— Johnny Cash, When the Man Comes Around

Right now, today, barangay officials across this country are filing applications for drug-cleared status. 

Like soldiers executing a command whose origins they were never permitted to question,they account for every name on their watchlist — reporting whether each listed person is dead, in jail, in rehabilitation, or has moved away. The paperwork ascends the administrative chain.

I know how this works because I ran the Caloocan Anti-Drug Abuse Office. I sat in the interagency meetings where five separate watchlists — from the President’s office, Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA), Department of the Interior and Local Government, Philippine National Police, and the consolidated barangay submissions — were laid side by side and reconciled. I watched names get color-coded: red for the dead, orange for those in jail, yellow for those in rehabilitation, light green for those who had moved or could no longer be found.

It was, in its way, a kind of last judgment rendered without tribunal — each soul assigned a color, a category, a fate. The drug-clearing process cannot be completed without this accounting. Which means as long as barangays are still seeking drug-cleared status, the lists are still alive.

Bishop Ambo David asked me recently how many lists there are. I told him: at least five. What I should have added is that the number is almost beside the point. What matters is that the lists are still operational, that the names inscribed in those years remain in unsecured ledgers.

Not one of the people on these lists was ever told their name was going to be included. Not one was given the legal basis for their inclusion. Not one was offered a hearing, a lawyer, or a right to be heard. They were named in the dark, like a whisper behind a closed door. The listing was the verdict. In the worst cases — on the Presidential watchlist, according to a PDEA agent I spoke with directly — it was also the sentence.

The 1987 Constitution guarantees due process before the state may deprive a person of life, liberty, or property. The Data Privacy Act of 2012 requires that personal data be collected for a lawful purpose, with transparency, and with the subject’s knowledge. The watchlists satisfy none of these requirements. They were built on a three-percent population quota from the former president’s public pronouncement — a census of the suspected, compiled not by evidence but by simple act of addition. A barangay of ten thousand residents had to produce three hundred names. It was like demanding a village tithe paid not in grain, but in persons. Where the names came from was secondary. What mattered was the number.

Barangay captains who refused to fill their quota were threatened with being listed themselves. Some were killed. Drop boxes were installed in barangay halls so anyone could submit a name anonymously, with no verification required. Mass surrenders — tapok-hangyo — were staged publicly, attendance was collected, and those names, including the barangay leaders who had gathered their constituents, got added to the watchlist. The system was designed to grow and it had no mechanism to shrink.

This is what it means to carry that name today.

Quiet extortion

Every barangay that is applying for drug-cleared status is consulting a list built this way. The officials handling those applications have access to the names. And an official who knows your name is on a list — in a country where being on that list once meant you could be killed — has something to sell you.

The extortion is quiet. It does not announce itself. It arrives in unregistered phone calls and in low voices outside the barangay hall. The person being approached cannot complain, because complaining means admitting they are on a list, to the very authority that may be wielding it against them. 

An officer does not need to be willing to use the list. They only need the person on it to remember what the list once meant. Fear, once planted in a person, does not require the sower to return; it tends itself.

There is a legal concept that could solve this situation. The European Court of Justice established it in 2014: the right to be forgotten. Individuals have the right to have personal data about them removed from accessible records when that data is no longer accurate, relevant, or lawfully held — the legal equivalent, one might say, of absolution: not erasure of what was done, but release from its perpetual power to define a person. The Philippines already has the statutory basis in the Data Privacy Act. What it does not have is a mechanism to apply that law to government watchlists.

Two bills in the House provide the opening. HB 6686, filed by Representative Leila de Lima for the Makatao coalition, proposes a Truth Commission on Extrajudicial Killings. De Lima knows this wound better than most — she was among the first to be unjustly coded yellow by the Duterte administration, and she spent six years and eight months of her prime behind bars for it.

HB 6677, filed by Akbayan’s Representatives Perci Cendaña, Chel Diokno, and Dadah Ismula with Representative Kaka Bag-ao, adds a reparations mechanism for victims and their families. A proposed amendment to HB 6686 would add what neither bill currently contains: a Delisting and Record Correction Division with the authority to hear petitions, require agencies to justify continued inclusion, and order names removed.

The burden of proof would be reversed — as burdens sometimes must be, when power has rested too long on the wrong shoulders. The agency must show why your name belongs on the list. If it cannot, within thirty days, your name comes off. You receive a certified Delisting Certificate. No officer can threaten you with a list you are no longer on. 

This is not amnesty, nor absolution for crimes committed, nor an erasure of memory. The delisting order touches only the administrative record — the living instrument that is still being used against people today. It will not apply to judicial records.

I was once part of this system. I attended the interagency meetings. I reviewed the color-coded status reports. I helped maintain the machinery that others used — and I have had to live with that. I am prepared to face whatever consequences come from saying so. It took me a while to decide to publish this. But everything I believe about law, about conscience, and about God has made it impossible to stay quiet. Silence in the face of continuing injustice is not neutrality. It is a choice, and it is its own kind of guilt.

The people on these lists have been waiting for someone with direct knowledge of the system to say, plainly and on the record, that it was wrong, that it is still running, and that the law has the tools to stop it if the legislature chooses to use them. They have been waiting the way a lost sheep waits — not knowing whether anyone is coming, only knowing she cannot find her way out alone.

Suspend it

The drug-clearing process should be suspended immediately, pending audit of the lists it relies on. HB 6686 and HB 6677 should be passed with the delisting amendment included. And the National Privacy Commission should issue an advisory today — not after the bills pass — declaring that the continued operational use of quota-based watchlists violates RA 10173. 

These are not complicated asks. They require only the acknowledgment that the drug war produced records that are still being used to harm people, and that the state has both the obligation and the authority to stop it. The tools are there. What is required now is the will to use them — which is, in the end, a question not just of law but of conscience.

The bishop asked how many lists there are. I gave him a number. But numbers are not what he was really asking about.

The more urgent question is: how many barangays are still processing drug-clearing applications right now? How many names are being submitted this week? How many families received a message this month from someone who knows their parent’s name is still on a list — still written, still legible, still alive in a ledger that was never meant to give anyone a way out?

The killings may have slowed, but the listings did not. Until these lists are audited, suspended, and subjected to lawful review, the drug war is not really over. – Rappler.com

A lawyer, the author served as head of the Caloocan Anti-Drug Abuse Office. A full policy paper and proposed legislative amendment on watchlist delisting, including the text of the proposed DRCD provisions for HB 6686, are available upon request.