Honor Bonifacio by Defying Impunity
To honor Bonifacio is to take up the courage he lived and continue the unfinished struggle he began: the fight for justice, dignity, and genuine democracy.
December 12, 2025
NUPL
The National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers is a nationwide voluntary association of human rights lawyers in the Philippines, committed to the defense, protection, and promotion of human rights, especially of the poor and the oppressed.

Press Statement
November 30, 2025

As we honor Andres Bonifacio and his legacy of militant and revolutionary struggle, we recall a truth that still cuts through our troubled times. Freedom becomes real only when people fight for it, and justice advances when citizens refuse to accept injustice as the order of the day.

We march today because impunity has taken firmer hold in a system built on bureaucrat capitalism. Corruption flourishes, accountability weakens, and ordinary citizens bear the weight. Silence in such a moment is never neutral. It shelters abuse, and the people refuse to offer that shelter.

The right to peaceably assemble stands as a constitutional guarantee that asks for neither permission slip nor imprimatur. Manila’s Anti Balaclava Ordinance, sweeping in language and intrusive in reach, strikes at privacy and expression. In practice, it arms state forces already too quick to treat dissent as suspicion.

The aggression, brutality, and abuses displayed by the police during the September 21 mass arrests revealed their true focus: to police the poor and the dissenters. What we saw was an institution that preserves the oppressive order—shielded, as ever, by impunity.

The people have never met this with folded hands. Heavy deployments, shutdown of cellular signals, and rules designed to chill civic participation cannot extinguish the right and the duty to speak truth to power. The people will continue to claim Luneta and the streets as forums for truth, exercising their right to protest as a living act of citizenship.

To honor Bonifacio is to take up the courage he lived and continue the unfinished struggle he began: the fight for justice, dignity, and genuine democracy.

NUPL stands with the people and with all who refuse to yield their rights in the face of intimidation. ###

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