Drilon asks Senate to stop debate on DFA’s budget

Senate President Franklin Drilon asked yesterday the Senate committee on finance to stop its deliberations on the proposed P4.8-billion budget of the Department of Foreign Affairs because the DFA is blocking the implementation of the Dual Citizenship Act.

At a press conference, Drilon said the DFA issued a memorandum requiring the registration of applicants for dual citizenship as absentee voters before they can re-acquire their Filipino citizenship under the Dual Citizenship Act.

"This is totally wrong and uncalled for," Drilon said. "The DFA is blocking the Dual Citizenship Act. I move to suspend the deliberations on the budget of the DFA until it reforms the (implementation of the) Dual Citizenship Act. The memorandum issued by the DFA effectively blocked the Dual Citizenship Act."

Drilon also said the registration of Filipino absentee voters expired on Sept. 30. "Under the memorandum of the DFA, no one can take their oath as Filipino citizens if they are not registered as absentee voters. (The DFA) also required them to pay $25 each as Filipino citizenship fee," he said.

He said the DFA explained that the $25 citizenship fee is expected to give the DFA a collection of P2 billion for a total of two million overseas Filipinos.

"This is almost half the budget of P4.8 billion that they are requesting from Congress. But then, they did not exert enough effort to have (the citizenship applicants) take their oath of allegiance in re-acquiring their Filipino citizenship," he said.

"The budget of the DFA will be frozen until the DFA submits the appropriate orders to address what is perceived to be their inadequacies," Drilon said.

He noted that the government spent P400 million for the registration of Filipino absentee voters.

Only 320,000 of the estimated one million Filipinos abroad were able to register as absentee voters when the Sept. 30 deadline passed, he said. In Hong Kong, only 88,000 of 120,000 Filipinos there were able to register.

"The DFA has, so far, collected $25,000 from over a thousand absentee voting registrants," Drilon said. "They justified the collection... of $25 as a fee for administering their oath (of allegiance)."

"All right, they charged a fee. But there is an opportunity for the DFA to have a collection of P2 billion in the US alone," he said. "They did not exert effort to have it collected by blocking the Dual Citizenship Act for reasons that only they know."

The proposed DFA budget for 2004 is P4,830,039,000.