As the Senate convenes as an impeachment court to try Vice President Sara Duterte, the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers (NUPL) issues a stern reminder to the senator-judges regarding a fundamental constitutional premise: the power you are about to exercise is not yours. It belongs to the people.

Article XI of the 1987 Constitution is clear that public office is a public trust. Impeachment is the exact mechanism the sovereign Filipino people embedded into our fundamental law to oust the highest officials who betray that trust. It is not a bargaining chip for rival factions of the ruling elite. It is not a weapon for dynastic warfare, nor is it a theater for political rehabilitation. When senators treat this constitutional process as a political transaction, they do not just fail their mandate; they usurp a power that was never theirs to trade in the first place.

We have seen how this chamber can easily bend to partisan interests and political self-preservation before it answers to the public. This is exactly why the people cannot simply entrust this trial to the senators alone. The law does not enforce itself, least of all against those in power. Every meaningful mechanism of accountability in our history only worked because an organized, vigilant public demanded it. The masses marching to the Senate today are not mere spectators to this trial. They are its rightful principals.

The NUPL therefore demands an expeditious trial that is entirely free from obstruction, dilatory tactics, and manufactured technicalities. We expect the full and unhindered presentation of evidence before the impeachment court and, by extension, the Filipino public. Above all, these proceedings must remain transparent, impartial, and strictly insulated from backroom deals or political accommodations.

We also reject the fiction that accountability begins and ends with Sara Duterte. The brazen plunder of public funds is not an isolated aberration by a single official. It is the standard operation of a state captured by competing political clans—Dutertes and Marcoses alike—and the elite interests backing them. The confidential funds at the center of this trial sit within the exact same architecture of impunity that shields extrajudicial killings from prosecution and diverts public wealth away from public need. Lahat ng sangkot, dapat managot.

This impeachment trial is just one battleground in the much longer struggle to make power truly answerable to the people it claims to serve. As people’s lawyers, the NUPL will watch these proceedings relentlessly and will stand with the Filipino people, fully aware that the fight for justice does not end when the Senate adjourns, but continues in the courts, in the streets, and in our communities. ###

Press Statement
6 July 2026

Reference:
Atty. Josalee S. Deinla
NUPL Secretary General
+639174316396

The post THE IMPEACHMENT COURT BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE: TRY SARA DUTERTE FULLY, TRANSPARENTLY, AND WITHOUT DELAY  appeared first on NUPL Philippines.

The question originally posed remains: Where was Palparan when the notices from the Supreme Court were refused by NBP personnel on his behalf in February and March 2026 for the reasons that Palparan “moved out: transferred to BuCor-Baguio” and “moved out to PMA Baguio” respectively?

The answer is clear: he was in Baguio City during that time. This is reflected in the above-mentioned handwritten notes in the returned mails, and confirmed by the tracking information of the Philpost. This was further supported by the PMA’s statement of non-denial and BuCor’s general statement that Palparan is still in their custody, without providing proof that he is still detained at the NBP.

Pushed to the wall by pressure from families of the victims and human rights groups, BuCor scrambled to bring Palparan back to the NBP. They did so just in time for the private complainants to see him in person inside the NBP. Contrary to the public statement of the NBP that the request of private complainants was only made on the same day of their visit, the request for verification was, in truth, sent to the BuCor as early as June 18, 2026.

To complete the performance, Palparan was shown to the private complainants in an orange shirt required for inmates at the maximum security compound, instead of the brown shirt worn by inmates at the minimum security compound which Palparan was seen wearing in the photo BuCor initially released in its vain effort to show that he was still at the NBP. Notably, NBP Superintendent Gary Garcia already publicly admitted that Palparan was previously held at the Minimum Security Compound purportedly due to unsubstantianted “security concerns.”

Despite this well-rehearsed, well-choreographed performance, the fact remains that the NBP returned the letters addressed to Palparan because he was not at the NBP when they were delivered. In its knee-jerk reaction to the issue, the BuCor unintentionally exposed to the public that Palparan is enjoying special privileges not accorded to other inmates. Aside from being allowed to stay inside the Minimum Security Compound, Palparan is also provided with regular medical care by the V. Luna Medical Center, a privilege that ordinary inmates can only dream of, while they have to wait for weeks, and even months, before requests for medical check-ups and laboratory tests are approved.

It is not enough that the BuCor presented Palparan to the private complainants on June 25, 2026. BuCor should explain why Palparan was previously allowed to be brought to PMA Baguio and why he is being accorded special privileges not given to other inmates.### 

Reference:

Atty. Julian Oliva, Jr.

NUPL Counsel

09175465799

The post Showing Jovito Palparan to Families of Karen Empeño and Sherlyn Cadapan Not Enough to Disprove Special Privileges Accorded by Bureau of Corrections to Convicted Human Rights Violator appeared first on NUPL Philippines.

These proposals run contrary to international child rights standards, scientific evidence on child development, and the principles underlying our juvenile justice system. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, through General Comment No. 24, have called on States not to lower the MACR below 14 years of age and to move toward higher age thresholds that reflect children’s evolving capacities, developmental needs, and cognitive maturity.

Republic Act No. 9344, as amended, recognizes that children in conflict with the law should be dealt with through a justice system that prioritizes intervention, diversion, and restorative justice. Weakening these protections would constitute a significant step backward in the advancement of children’s rights.

The tragic incidents of school violence in Tacloban and Cavite should not be used to justify lowering the MACR. Rather than resorting to punitive measures, policymakers must address the underlying causes of juvenile offending, including poverty, disempowering education system, abuse, neglect, social exclusion, and unmet developmental and mental health needs. These incidents likewise highlight the responsibility of parents, schools, communities, and government to ensure the safety and well-being of children.

At a time when violence and impunity continue to persist in society, including against human rights defenders, church workers, women, youth, and children, lowering the age of criminal responsibility will not make our communities safer. What is needed are stronger child protection mechanisms, accessible social services, quality education, and effective community-based interventions.

NUPL reiterates that the appropriate response to juvenile offenses is not the criminalization of younger children but the meaningful and sustained addressing of its root causes in a manner that upholds children’s rights.### 

Reference: 

Atty. Katherine A. Panguban

NUPL Committee on Women and Children Head 

+639566730301

The post NUPL Joins Calls Opposing Proposals to Lower the Minimum Age of Criminal Responsibility appeared first on NUPL Philippines.

The organization resolved to continue defending human rights and confronting violations, attacks, and intimidation directed not only at various sectors but also at its own members.

The two-day event, held on June 20–21, was attended by lawyers from Panay, Eastern Visayas, and Cebu, together with representatives from the NUPL National Office, law student chapters, and paralegals.

The post NUPL Visayas Marks Successful Chapter Assembly appeared first on NUPL Philippines.

According to reports, a male person who identified himself as Fernando Gopilan tried to gain access to Atty. Dannug-Salucon’s condominium unit by pretending to be her nephew. A staff member of the condominium called Atty. Salucon’s daughter, who denied that he is a relative. Upon hearing this, Fernando Gopita left in a hurry.

Before this incident, Atty. Dannug-Salucon has been the subject of surveillance and harassment from suspected state agents. She sought protection by filing a Petition for Writ of Amparo and a Petition for Writ of Habeas Data with the Court of Appeals.

On March 12, 2015, the Court of Appeals issued the privilege of the Writ of Amparo in her favor. The Supreme Court affirmed the issuance of the Writ of Amparo in its decision dated January 24, 2018.

Despite the issuance of the Writ, Atty. Dannug-Salucon still experienced surveillance and harassment from suspected state agents.

In a Manifestation filed in March 2026, Atty. Dannug-Salucon reported to the Court of Appeals the information she received that a certain police officer in her hometown in Isabela was overheard boasting that he was assigned to conduct surveillance on Atty. Dannug-Salucon.

The constant and persistent surveillance on Atty. Dannug-Salucon is alarming. This may be a prelude to a physical attack, which may endanger her life and security.

It is about time to prove that the Writ of Amparo is indeed an effective remedy for the protection of life, liberty, and security. We are holding on to what the Supreme Court said in Bautista vs. Dannug-Salucon (G.R. No. 221862, January 23, 2018) that:

“Even so, it would be uncharacteristic for the courts, especially this Court, to simply fold their arms and ignore the palpable threats to her life, liberty, and security and just wait for the irreversible to happen to her.”

We hope that those required to give protection to Atty. Dannug-Salucon will not “simply fold their arms and ignore the palpable threats to her life, liberty, and security”, and act promptly and not “just wait for the irreversible to happen to her”.

#HandsOffAttyDannugSalucon

#StopAttacksAgainstLawyers

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Read the whole statement here: bit.ly/NUPL_Palparan

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Read the whole statement here: https://bit.ly/NUPL_Topacio

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To recall, in 2018, Palparan was convicted of the kidnapping and serious illegal detention of Sherlyn and Karen. His conviction marked a significant milestone in the long-fought struggle for justice by victims of enforced disappearances and human rights violations.

However, throughout the trial and even after his conviction, Palparan has repeatedly enjoyed privileges and special treatment unavailable to ordinary persons deprived of liberty. For years, he was detained at Fort Bonifacio rather than in a regular detention facility, purportedly due to alleged threats to his safety. Reports also indicate that after his transfer to the New Bilibid Prison (NBP), he was not committed to a regular prison cell alongside other inmates. Only a year after he was convicted, Palparan was likewise allowed an on-camera interview while serving his sentence and facing another criminal trial, despite strict rules governing media access to persons deprived of liberty and the absence of any known court authorization.

Reports that Palparan has now been transferred to the PMA are deeply alarming. As a prisoner serving a sentence of reclusion perpetua, he should remain confined at the Maximum Security Camp of the NBP in Muntinlupa City.

Allowing a convicted perpetrator of grave human rights violations to receive extraordinary accommodations sends the wrong message—that accountability may be evaded by those with power or connections. It diminishes the hard-won victories of victims and their families, who have endured years of pain and suffering in their pursuit of justice.

The National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers (NUPL) stands with the families of Sherlyn Cadapan, Karen Empeño, and with all victims of enforced disappearance in demanding full disclosure of Palparan’s whereabouts. ###

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Please see below the full acceptance speech of Atty. Josa Deinla, Secretary General of the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers.

REMARKS ON RECEIVING THE
ROBERT F. KENNEDY HUMAN RIGHTS AWARD
National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers | Washington, D.C. | 04 June 2026

To Kerry Kennedy and the Ethel and Robert Kennedy Human Rights Center, to our allies, partners, and friends gathered here and across the world who have stood with us through the years — maraming salamat po. Thank you.

Our hearts are full — with gratitude, and with the dull ache of knowing that the conditions making our work necessary have not relented. We are people’s lawyers— human rights defenders practicing law in the Philippines, where law, as in many countries, is shaped to concentrate power, to punish dissent, and to make injustice look orderly and legitimate.

Close to two decades ago, our pioneers laid the groundwork for the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers. The Union emerged from a crucible of state violence at a time when activists were killed or disappeared every day, and law was twisted into a tool to weaken their collective resistance. By this time, the Red Scare’s legacy of stigmatizing dissent in the U.S. has taken hold in the Philippines—delegitimizing criticism and paralyzing humanitarian work. A permanent state of emergency, justified in the name of security, has eaten away at the most basic guarantees of due process.

Into this, people’s lawyers have risen not only in courtrooms but wherever the people’s cause had to be defended. People’s lawyers have stood in the frontlines with victims of grave rights violations, political prisoners, and marginalized communities. We have defended people who are met with repression each time they dare fight for their rights or question why we, in a country so rich in land, labor and resources, are so poor.

That choice has never been without cost. Our lawyers have been red-tagged, surveilled, threatened, and prosecuted on fabricated charges. We have been labeled terrorists. And we have buried colleagues.

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 communities. Attorneys Ben and Juan were shot dead in broad daylight by unidentified state agents. No one, to this day, has been brought to the bar of justice for their killings.

Attys. Ben and Juan showed us that our profession is a battleground between a congealed “rule of law” that protects the oppressive status quo, and a living rule of justice that protects human life. When a state feels the need to silence lawyers, it is because law, wielded on behalf of the people, is a genuine threat to power. We thus take their unfinished work as our mandate to stay the course.

And we do this by staying together. By practicing — as I tell our new lawyers — with skill but also with tenderness. With discipline but also with fire. By never forgetting that behind every hearing, every jail visit, every late-night pleading, are people whose lives have been made harder by a system that was never built for them.

Our task is not to make peace with that reality, but to confront it. For we know that people in the Philippines and elsewhere will continue to rise, organize, and resist because the conditions that produce dissent have never been addressed.

A drug war that killed tens of thousands of poor Filipinos where uniformed killers received commendations instead of charges, where perpetrators are allowed to flee as fugitives, coddled by their powerful peers while journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio and humanitarian worker Marielle Domequil languish in jail, convicted for a crime they did not commit. Corruption so endemic and so brazen that public office has become extraction — where billions meant for social services disappear into the machinery of political patronage, while farmers remain landless and workers remain without security.

These are not grievances invented by radicals. These are the daily lives of millions of Filipinos. When they form unions, peasant associations, indigenous peoples’ groups, or human rights organizations, they are labeled communist terrorists. Then too often, they are arrested, disappeared, or killed.

Just weeks ago, on April 19, nineteen people were killed by government forces in Toboso, Negros Occidental in Central Philippines. The farmers among the victims belonged to a community that, just months before, reclaimed and cultivated a portion of a hacienda—land their families had tilled for decades, taken over without legal title, and that they were finally asserting the right to farm. The military called it a legitimate operation against communist rebels. But accounts from the community, first responders, and the families of victims tell a different story — one that raises grave concerns of summary execution and the use of lethal force against persons already rendered hors de combat.

Among the dead were two American citizens: activists Lyle Prijoles and Kai Sorem.

I pause here to speak to how state violence reaches even those who show solidarity with the poor and the oppressed in the Philippines.

This violence cannot be separated from the fraught history between the United States and the Philippines — born of colonization, sustained through bilateral security arrangements like the Visiting Forces Agreement and the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement that our people have long questioned. When military assistance flows into a state apparatus without accountability, it subsidizes repression, under which a farmer defending his land is labeled a rebel, and a massacre is sanitized as an armed encounter.

Yet even as we challenge the geopolitical logic of states, we deeply embrace the solidarity of global civil society. Our presence here tonight is proof that the strategic policies of governments are not the same as the conscience of their citizens. In allies like you, we find an unyielding refusal to look away. You have chosen to stand with us when institutions at home seek to criminalize our work.

The concentration of power and weaponization of law are common features of societies unwilling to confront their underlying inequities — and they are unfolding here, now, in the country whose democratic ideals the Philippines was once asked to mirror: migrants detained without charge, oversight bodies dismantled, and fear manufactured to justify the suspension of rights.

Recognizing this pattern compels us to confront a dangerous illusion: the myth of an immutable democracy.

We are conditioned to treat our democratic institutions — our courts, our elections, our free press — as if they are permanent guarantees. We are trained to look past systemic injustice by calling it a glitch, a temporary malfunction, or the fault of a few bad officials. We are told to patch up the edifice while forbidden from disturbing the bedrock.

But when a society mistakes the trappings of democracy for democracy itself — when it treats institutions as infallible while they are actively used to crush human dignity — it falls into a fatal passivity. It fails to see that fascism does not always arrive by smashing the machinery of law. It arrives by occupying it, rewiring it, and using its processes to make injustice look legitimate. It wants us to believe that the violence inflicted on a starving peasant in Negros has nothing to do with the state power deployed against a student or an undocumented worker in America.

But the tiny ripples of hope that Robert Kennedy once imagined do cross oceans. They reach each other from a million different centers of energy and daring. We cross that ocean now, from the Manila to Washington, to propose a solidarity that refuses to be comforted by myths.

We accept this award as an anchor of our shared struggle. It binds our reality to yours, forcing us to look at each other, to disrupt the myths that keep us complacent, and to refuse to make peace with an orderly tyranny. Let us continue, side by side, the urgent work of lawyering for the people, of defending their rights.

To NUPL — my colleagues — ours has never been an easy path. But we will stay the course, knowing that movements grounded in the people’s struggles are built to last.

To our colleagues who have passed on: you made a remarkable choice, and we will honor it every day.

To every people’s lawyer across the world: you are never alone, and we stand with you. To every lawyer who has not chosen which path to take, choose people’s lawyering and be the best lawyer money cannot buy.

To our clients and the peoples of the world whose rights are under siege: so long as you fight, we will fight beside you.

On behalf of my colleagues especially those who plod on out of the limelight and our clients who believe in us, thank you for this honor.

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