Memory as resistance, justice as duty
We will fight to finish what was started and to build the just and free society that EDSA promised but has yet to deliver.
February 25, 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
February 25, 2025

Decades after the fall of the Marcos dictatorship, the very forces it embodied remain deeply entrenched in our political and economic systems. The return of the Marcoses to power is not just a historical irony; it is the deliberate erasure of truth and the repeated failure of institutions to hold the powerful to account.

Worse, the same failure to exact justice haunts us today: Sara Duterte is yet to tried before the impeachment court, while Rodrigo Duterte remains unpunished for the thousands of drug war-related extrajudicial killings under his regime. Their continued evasion of justice proves that impunity is not an aberration, but a systemic failure. It thrives when history is rewritten and resistance is silenced.

This is why we do not mark the anniversary of EDSA to indulge in nostalgia. We remember to resist. We remember because impunity thrives where memory fades. And we remember because the fight for justice remains an urgent and unfinished task.

But justice demands more than remembrance. It requires dismantling the very structures that sustain impunity, including the militarization of governance and the weaponization of the law against dissent. It demands an end to state-sponsored killings, political persecution, and the suppression of civil liberties. It means exposing and confronting the machinery of historical distortion that seeks to whitewash past crimes while justifying present-day abuses.

The betrayal of EDSA is not just in the return of the Marcoses or the continued rule of political dynasties. It is in every stolen life, every silenced voice, and every truth distorted to serve the powerful. It is in the unpunished crimes of the past that embolden today’s oppressors. It is in the state’s refusal to confront the deep injustices that fuel armed resistance and keep generations trapped in poverty.

History, however, is not destiny. The power that once toppled a dictator still burns in every Filipino who refuses to be silenced and to accept injustice as fate. The fight for justice is not a relic of the past: it is our duty today.

We will fight to finish what was started and to build the just and free society that EDSA promised but has yet to deliver.

Never forget. Never surrender. Never again.

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

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