The National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers (NUPL) welcomes and fully endorses the report of UN Special Rapporteur Irene Khan on freedom of opinion and expression in the Philippines. The report lays bare the ongoing weaponization of law against human rights defenders, journalists, and civil society actors who challenge state power and expose structural injustice.
As the Special Rapporteur correctly observes, acts of criticism and advocacy that interrogates the root causes of conflict are not terrorism; they are legitimate exercises of free expression protected under both the Philippine Constitution and international human rights law. But the state continues to collapse the distinction between dissent and criminality, deploying the language of counterterrorism to suppress political discourse and silence those who speak for the marginalized.
The cases of journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio and rights defenders Mariel Domequil and Alexander Abinguna, whose defense we actively handle, demonstrate how legal processes themselves are manipulated to muzzle dissent. They remain in prolonged, pretrial detention on dubious charges, after being publicly vilified and red-tagged, in a pattern that strips legal protections of their substantive meaning. Such prosecutions reflect an entrenched strategy of state repression cloaked in legal form.
The blocking of Bulatlat under vague claims of terrorist affiliation further exposes how national security discourse is routinely exploited to justify censorship, undermine the right to information, and shield state abuse from public scrutiny.
We fully support the Special Rapporteur’s key recommendations: to amend the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020, whose vague and overbroad provisions undermine judicial oversight and enable warrantless arrests and expanded surveillance; to decriminalize libel, long used as a tool of political reprisal against journalists; to enact a robust Freedom of Information law grounded in maximum disclosure for the public interest; and to finally pass the long-overdue Human Rights Defenders Protection Act.
We likewise share the Special Rapporteur’s skepticism toward any proposal to rebrand the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) as a peace-building entity. Its institutional record as a central organ of red-tagging, harassment, and intimidation renders such a transformation implausible without a full reckoning with its role in past and ongoing violations.
The Special Rapporteur’s report compels urgent legal and institutional measures to dismantle the structures of impunity that continue to subvert the rule of law. The Philippine government now faces a decisive choice: to maintain a legal order that instrumentalizes law as a tool of repression, or to finally fulfill its obligation to uphold democratic accountability and human rights. ###
Reference:
Atty. Josalee S. Deinla
NUPL Secretary General
+639174316396
