PRESS STATEMENT
A serial red-tagger and former spokesperson of the NTF-ELCAC has once again weaponized her platform to baselessly vilify the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers (NUPL). She recycled the unfounded claim that our organization is a “CPP-NPA-NDF front” and mocked us as the “National Union of Patakas Lawyers,” accusing us of making a habit of freeing so-called “communist terrorists” before the courts. We categorically condemn this dangerous assault on people’s lawyers.
This latest smear was deployed to discredit Atty. Amando Virgil Ligutan, a private prosecutor in the ongoing impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte, by falsely linking him to our ranks. For the NUPL, this deadly script is a tired, yet lethal, reality. Long before Atty. Ligutan’s name was dragged into these fabricated narratives, the NUPL has borne the brunt of a ruthless counter-insurgency framework that criminalizes and vilifies the assertion of rights and freedoms. In 2018, our founding member and NUPL-Negros Secretary General, Atty. Benjamin Ramos, was included in a hit-list poster in Moises Padilla, branded as an NPA recruiter as he was representing farmers and the rural poor. By November of that year, he was assassinated in Kabankalan City shortly after assisting families of farmers who were massacred in Sagay.
We have relentlessly pushed back against red-tagging, even when our legal attempts to seek accountability have fallen short. In 2023, the Office of the Ombudsman found both spokespersons of the NTF-ELCAC administratively liable for red-tagging our organization. But the penalty was a mere reprimand. Nothing else followed: there was no retraction, no accountability, and no change in behavior.
It is within this repressive context that the UN Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers—the Havana Principles—must be understood. The Havana Principles obligate governments to ensure lawyers can practice without intimidation and mandate the protection of lawyers under threat. Most crucially, Principle 18 explicitly forbids identifying lawyers with their clients or their clients’ causes.
A person charged under the government’s draconian counter-terrorism framework does not forfeit the presumption of innocence—a fundamental right that is never conditional on the political sympathies of the regime. When the NUPL defends clients accused of being insurgents, we are not “freeing communist terrorists,” as falsely claimed. We are fulfilling the exact mandate of the Havana Principles, which emphasize that the adequate protection of human rights requires all persons to have effective access to an independent legal profession. To brand us “patakas” for discharging this constitutional duty is an affront not just to the NUPL, but to the basic tenets of due process.
The timing of this incident is entirely deliberate. Red-tagging a counsel in one of the most consequential proceedings for accountability in recent history—the impeachment of a sitting Vice President—is a desperate maneuver. It is an ad hominem tactic designed to weaken the prosecution and the merits of its case. It is a stark reminder that red-tagging is utilized not only to silence dissenters, but also to protect the powerful from accountability.
Red-tagging must be exposed and rejected every time it is deployed, whether against a private prosecutor demanding accountability from the highest offices, or a people’s lawyer defending a farmer in the countryside. The NUPL has endured this lethal rhetoric for years, but it has never stopped us from standing by our clients. We will continue to defend the poor and the persecuted, and assert the independence of the legal profession against those who seek to dismantle it. ###
Reference:
Atty. Josalee S. Deinla
NUPL Secretary General
+639174316396
(Photo credit: Bulatlat.com)
