Mainit na pagbati at mataas na pagpupugay sa Bulatlat, sa lahat ng bumubuo ng Bulatlat, tagapaglathala mula sa Alipato Media Center, editors, mamamahayag, at contributors.
The National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers extends its warmest solidarity to Bulatlat for a quarter-century of journalism in the service of the people.
Surviving twenty-five years as an independent media organization is no small feat in a country where telling the truth paints a target on your back.
Our solidarity has never been merely ceremonial. We have stood together on the actual battlegrounds of press freedom and human rights: in courtrooms and on protest lines, against red-tagging and state surveillance, weathering cyberattacks, censorship, fabricated charges, and the weaponization of the law against those who refuse to be silenced.
We remember the relentless state-backed cyberattacks that prompted a groundbreaking civil action assisted by the NUPL. We remember the government’s 2022 campaign to block Bulatlat and other independent websites on the mere say-so of the national security establishment—branding journalism as terrorism and censorship as state security.
For over three years, we fought that order in court.
In November 2025, the Quezon City Regional Trial Court finally struck down the NTC memorandum, ruling that the government had zero legal basis to restrict website access and that the blocking order was an act of unconstitutional prior restraint.
That victory belonged to Bulatlat. But it also belonged to every red-tagged journalist, every human rights defender branded an enemy of the State, and every Filipino whose right to know relies on a press that refuses to ask permission from those in power.
We know the pattern all too well.
When those in authority cannot counter journalism with facts, they counter it with labels. When labels fail, they resort to harassment, surveillance, and bogus prosecutions. The vocabulary changes—communist front, terrorist, purveyor of disinformation, foreign agent—but the objective remains exactly the same: to make dissent dangerous, solidarity suspect, and truth costly.
In this context, the struggles of independent journalists and human rights lawyers are inseparable.
The state comes for the reporter who documents the abuse and the lawyer who challenges it. They vilify the publication that gives the oppressed a platform and the counsel who brings their grievances to court. They want both the witness and the advocate to disappear.
Yet here we are.
After twenty-five years, Bulatlat is still here.
Still reporting from the picket line rather than the press briefing. Still telling the stories of workers, peasants, Indigenous peoples, political prisoners, women, the urban poor, and communities deliberately rendered invisible by the dominant media. Still insisting that journalism must do more than record the words of the powerful—it must interrogate power itself.
Today, we do more than offer congratulations.
We salute a comrade in the struggle for truth, freedom, and justice.
May the next twenty-five years bring sharper pens, stronger defenses, and more victories. Above all, may it bring a people increasingly unafraid to speak, organize, resist, and demand accountability.
Mabuhay ang Bulatlat! Mabuhay ang malayang pamamahayag! Mabuhay ang mamamayang patuloy na lumalaban para sa katotohanan at karapatan!
