Railroaded through the legislature during a pandemic lockdown and over the broadest constitutional opposition in our history, Republic Act No. 11479, the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 (ATA), was always an instrument of state repression. When the law faced thirty-seven constitutional petitions before the Supreme Court, including our own, we warned that this legislation was designed to target activists, human rights defenders, journalists, humanitarian workers, and marginalized communities. Six years of draconian enforcement have vindicated our warnings, case by fabricated case, freeze order by arbitrary freeze order.
The State’s own judicial record exposes the lie. Prosecutions for terrorism and terrorism financing under the ATA and its companion statute, the Terrorism Financing Prevention and Suppression Act, routinely collapse under judicial scrutiny. They are dismissed on constitutional grounds, thrown out for sheer lack of evidence, or end in acquittals because there was never a legitimate case to begin with—only political persecution masquerading as national security. Against this massive record of prosecutorial failure stands the conviction of journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio and humanitarian worker Marielle Domequil. This verdict runs contrary to the evidentiary standards upheld in comparable cases, and it is a conviction we will relentlessly contest until it is overturned.
But acquittal under this regime is not vindication, because the twin terror laws were engineered to punish without the need for a trial. The ATA has carved out a permanent, undeclared state of emergency within our legal system. It erodes the fundamental right to due process, granting the executive the power to detain suspects without judicial warrants for a prolonged period, and empowering the Anti-Terrorism Council to designate individuals and organizations as terrorists without prior notice or hearing. Once designated, the Anti-Money Laundering Council enforces crippling asset freezes that do not lift even when the underlying criminal charges die. Activists and development workers have been designated with no established links to terrorism, their personal accounts paralyzed, and their humanitarian programs strangled by administrative fiat. Under this framework, the process is the punishment itself.
None of this is a mere error in implementation or “unintended consequences.” What the State administers under the guise of “counter-terrorism” is, in brutal practice, a counterinsurgency campaign. The National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) directs this machinery, while the terror laws supply its legal weapons. Red-tagging remains the State’s primary method of vilification, persisting with impunity even after the Supreme Court explicitly recognized in Deduro v. Vinoya that the practice threatens life, liberty, and security. Six years of documentation establish its lethal function: red-tagging precedes the violence, or follows it to justify what was done. On 19 April of this year, nineteen people were massacred in Barangay Salamanca, Toboso, Negros Occidental—among them minors and two American citizens. The military’s sweeping insistence that all the dead were armed combatants and “terrorists” is an attempt to convert a slaughter into an accomplishment, reducing human beings to legitimate targets. This is the ultimate, deadly function of the counter-terrorism vocabulary.
And the State’s architecture of repression is expanding. Pending before Congress are the Terror Grooming Prevention Act and the cluster of Counter Foreign Interference bills—the next chapter in the same repressive playbook. The anti-grooming bills seek to criminalize emotional and ideological bonds, weaponizing the supposed protection of youth and the vulnerable as a pretext to persecute activists and dismantle communities. They seek to set up a National Terror Grooming Prevention Program that deputizes teachers, social workers, health workers, and barangay officials to identify “early signs of radicalization,” feeding names and organizational affiliations into a centralized database with no safeguards or process for removal. They compel internet service providers to block content within twenty-four hours of an executive notice, bypassing judicial review entirely. Meanwhile, the Counter Foreign Interference bills complete the enclosure by importing elastic categories of “coercive or threatening conduct” in collaboration with a “foreign principal”—language broad enough to criminalize the international solidarity and advocacy on which Philippine civil society has always depended. Every arm of the State, from the school to the barangay, is being conscripted into a single counterinsurgency effort.
This domestic tyranny is licensed at the multilateral level, where the same states that built the global counter-terrorism regime have refused to submit it to independent oversight. The Ninth Review of the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, adopted two days ago without consensus for the first time in twenty years, rolled forward the existing text and defeated every proposal to build oversight into it — including the Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights’ own recommendation for an independent human rights oversight office, and his call for equal recognition of the victims of state violations committed while countering terrorism. The refusal to define “terrorism” at the UN level is the exact condition that allows domestic regimes to sweep lawful dissent into an ever-expanding security framework.
On this sixth anniversary, our calls remain uncompromising because the facts remain unchanged. We demand the immediate repeal of the Anti-Terrorism Act and the Terrorism Financing Prevention and Suppression Act. We call for the complete dismantling of the NTF-ELCAC and an end to the lethal practice of red-tagging in all its forms. The State must immediately lift the wrongful designations and arbitrary freeze orders that outlive the fabricated charges they were built on, free Frenchie Mae Cumpio and Marielle Domequil, and provide meaningful redress for every individual and organization this law has wrongfully targeted.
State terror masquerading as law cannot be normalized. We will not relent until this system of repression is completely dismantled and the democratic rights of the people are fully restored. ###
Press Statement
3 July 2026
Reference:
Atty. Josalee S. Deinla
NUPL Secretary General
+639174316396
Photo: Iya Espiritu/Kodao
