Rights defenders and other activists gathered at Liwasang Bonifacio in Manila to commemorate this year’s International Human Rights Day, denouncing continuing human rights violations under the Ferdinand Marcos Jr. government.
Led by rights group Karapatan, the protesters also condemned international humanitarian law (IHL) violations and large-scale bureaucratic corruption by what they dubbed as among the most rotten regimes in the country’s history.
“The Marcos Jr. regime has consistently responded with repression as we rise to resist transgressions on people’s rights,” Karapatan said.
The group reported that government armed forces are responsible for 134 extrajudicial killings (EJK); 15 enforced disappearances; 822 arbitrary arrests; 577 forced or fake surrenders; 70,028 cases of indiscriminate firing; and 57,156 cases of indiscriminate bombing since July 2022.
In addition, there have also been 48,247 victims of forced evacuation and millions of victims of threats, harassment and intimidation, including redtagging, it added.
“These scourges are added afflictions on peasants, workers and the middle class who are already reeling from a chronic economic crisis driven by the government’s acquiescence to the neoliberal policies of the US,” Karapatan secretary general Cristina Palabay said.
Violating rules of war
Karapatan accused the Marcos Jr. government of continuous IHL violations in its civil war with the insurgent forces, revealing that the vast majority of EJK victims are leaders or members of peasant organizations who are falsely portrayed by the military as rebels killed in armed encounters.
Indiscriminate firing, aerial and artillery attacks in the course of military operations are likewise IHL violations affecting civilians, their livelihoods and properties, it added.
The group also bewailed that hundreds of political prisoners are languishing in jails nationwide as “living proof of the regime’s repression.”
“As of the fourth quarter of 2025, there are at least 696 political prisoners held in various detention facilities nationwide, 163 of them arrested under Marcos Jr,” Karapatan said.
They include 12 peace consultants and staff of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), including those arrested since Marcos Jr.’s predecessor Rodrigo Duterte scuttled peace talks with the revolutionary movement.
Wielding weaponized laws
Karapatan said Marcos Jr. increasingly weaponized the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) and the Terrorism Financing Prevention and Suppression Act (TFPSA) to clamp down on political dissent and expression.
“Up to 227 mass leaders and activists have been falsely charged with violating the ATA and/or the TFPSA. Thirty of them are currently detained,” Karapatan reported.
It also revealed that 34 personalities, including NDFP consultants and leaders of people’s organizations, have been arbitrarily designated as “terrorists.”
There are two are victims of enforced disappearance under Marcos, it said, referring to James Jazmines and Felix Salavierra Jr., abducted one after the other in Albay province last August 2024.
Method to madness
Karapatan said Marcos Jr. wants to stamp out all dissent, as shown by his issuance of his government’s National Action Plan for Unity, Peace and Development (NAP-UPD) in May this year.
With the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) as lead agency, the regime has been utilizing all of the government’s resources to profile activists, red-tag them, harass and pressure them to surrender as armed rebels, the group said.
“Those who refuse to fall into the NTF-ELCAC’s trap become victims of EJK or enforced disappearance or are arrested and detained on trumped-up charges,” Palabay said.
She said the new counter-insurgency program is actually a continuation of US counter-insurgency programs implemented in the country for decades.
“In this case, the NAP-UPD adheres closely to US imperialism’s designs for the Philippines as outlined in the US National Defense Strategy, the Philippines Bilateral Defense Guidelines and the National Security Strategy,” Palabay continued.
The US wants its puppet Marcos Jr. to whip everyone in line to ensure that the Philippines plays its role of pawn efficiently in America’s power struggles with China, she explained.
This, however, seriously endangers the security and welfare of the Filipino people who may be engulfed in a conflict not of their own making, the country’s most active human rights alliance said.
Corruption as human rights violation
Government corruption that involves Marcos Jr. himself is in itself a form of rights violation, Palabay said.
Marcos Jr. has used his presidency to recover his family’s ill-gotten wealth from sequestration and prevent the payment of his family’s multi-billion peso estate tax obligations even before the flood control corruption scandal blew up on his face, Palabay added.
“Meanwhile, much earlier exposés of Vice President Sara Duterte’s fascistic and militarist mindset and her anomalous use of hundreds of millions of pesos in Confidential and Intelligence Funds have amply demonstrated to the Filipino people that the solution does not lie in installing Marcos Jr.’s equally corrupt and fascist successor as president,” she cautioned.
Karapatan explained that every peso stolen by bureaucrat capitalists is a peso diverted from urgently needed social services for the people.
“We are dying from a system that has held us in a stranglehold with US-imposed economic programs that have impoverished us, with US-designed counter-insurgency schemes that have brutalized us, and with bureaucratic greed and corruption that have deprived us of the wherewithal to live decently,” the group added.
Karapatan said today’s rallies throughout the country is in defense of the civil and political rights that Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte have ruthlessly tramples on.
The group will lead a march to Mendiola after its main program at Liwasang Bonifacio. # (Raymund B.Villanueva)
