The National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers (NUPL) vehemently condemns the escalating, systematic harassment leveled against its members in Nueva Vizcaya—Atty. Fidel Santos and Atty. Edgardo “Edu” Balgos—who have steadfastly stood with marginalized communities defending their ancestral land, water, and forests against destructive corporate mining.
Within a span of weeks, Atty. Santos has been subjected to a malicious cyber libel complaint filed by the North Luzon Mineral Resources Corporation, alongside a retaliatory persona non grata declaration by the Bugkalot Confederation of Nueva Vizcaya, Quirino, and Aurora. These coordinated acts target a people’s lawyer for exercising his fundamental freedom of speech outside the courtroom—raising legitimate, urgent questions regarding corporate plunder, environmental destruction, and the illegal dispossession of indigenous lands. We firmly maintain that lawyers do not shed their constitutional rights when they take up the public interest. Rather, their advocacy is indispensable to shaping public discourse and guaranteeing genuine access to justice.
This trumped-up criminal complaint is a textbook Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP): the abuse of legal mechanisms not to vindicate a genuine legal right, but to exhaust, intimidate, and silence human rights defenders, activists, and dissenters. It perverts the legal system and co-opts community institutions into instruments of political reprisal. Persona non grata resolutions, meanwhile, are hostile declarations that are never mere expressions of disagreement, but rather dangerous instruments of state and corporate sanction designed to stigmatize, isolate, and endanger advocates on the ground.
Atty. Santos merely dared to demand transparency regarding a mining company’s legal compliance and the irreversible human and environmental toll of its operations in Kasibu. For fulfilling this professional and ethical duty, he is made to face malicious prosecution and public exclusion. Atty. Balgos faces an identical campaign of vilification and intimidation precisely because he, too, refused to betray the people’s cause by remaining silent.
NUPL demands an immediate end to all forms of harassment, vilification, and retaliatory legal action against Attys. Santos and Balgos. We call upon all state agencies, local authorities, and community bodies to respect and uphold the UN Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers by ensuring that people’s lawyers are able to perform all of their professional functions without intimidation, hindrance, harassment, or improper interference, and that they shall not suffer, or be threatened with, prosecution or extra-legal sanctions for standing alongside marginalized communities.
No lawyer should ever be persecuted for standing with the people. ###
Press Statement
20 July 2026
Reference:
Atty. Josalee S. Deinla
NUPL Secretary General
+639174316396
Photo credit: Atty. Ellice Balgos
