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

Read more

In the Service of the Filipino People

In the Service of the Filipino People

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.

Philippine Defeat in UN Security Council Bid Shows Human Rights Record Cannot Be Ignored

Philippine Defeat in UN Security Council Bid Shows Human Rights Record Cannot Be Ignored

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.

On the Denial of the Petition Challenging the Terrorist Designation of Cordillera Peoples Alliance Leaders and the Constitutionality of the Anti-Terrorism Act

On the Denial of the Petition Challenging the Terrorist Designation of Cordillera Peoples Alliance Leaders and the Constitutionality of the Anti-Terrorism Act

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.

Share This