"This award is a salute to our battle-scarred visionary leaders, but above all, it belongs to our fallen. It honors Atty. Benjamin Ramos, Atty. Juan Macababbad, and others who paid the ultimate price for standing with poor peasants, workers, and indigenous...
NUPL Vice President Atty. Angelo Karlo Guillen and Secretary General Atty. Josa Deinla with lawyers from the Kennedy Human Rights Center and Kerry Kennedy at the Capitol in Washington D.C.
The Philippine government finds paths only to new methods of repression and enforces the peace of the grave at home. Human rights monitors, including Karapatan, document a continuing pattern of violence: extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests, and widespread attacks on rural communities. On April 19, state forces killed 19 people in Toboso, Negros Occidental, including civilians standing in solidarity with farmers asserting their land rights.
The petitioners, all respected advocates for indigenous peoples’ rights and self-determination, sought judicial review of their designation as terrorists by the Anti-Terrorism Council (ATC) in 2023. Their petition constituted the first—and, to our knowledge, remains the only—as-applied constitutional challenge to the ATC’s power to designate individuals and organizations as terrorists under the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020.
