A state afraid of its own people calls its most principled citizens by other names. The activist is a terrorist. The peasant organizer is a murderer. The human rights advocate is a kidnapper. When deployed by state forces, these labels rewrite political convictions as criminal offenses, setting in motion the harassment of perceived dissidents, their arrest and detention without due process, their disappearance and death. According to the human rights organization Karapatan, as of March 2025, there are 745 political prisoners in the Philippines, among them 160 arrested under Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Since he assumed the presidency in July 2022, there have been 15 enforced disappearances and 124 extrajudicial killings.

It is no consolation that Irene Khan, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, has found Marcos Jr. to be “more open and tolerant” when compared to his predecessor Rodrigo Duterte, who “publicly disparaged and threatened his critics.” Khan’s final report on the Philippines, which was presented to the United Nations Human Rights Council in June 2025, acknowledges that the discourse is more hospitable to human rights under Marcos Jr.’s administration, and also highlights its turn to action in the March 2025 arrest of Duterte and his subsequent transfer to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. Duterte faces charges of murder as a crime against humanity covering almost a decade, beginning in 2011, when he was mayor of Davao City, up through 2019, three years into his presidency, when his administration withdrew the Philippines’ membership in the ICC, in response to the tribunal’s investigation of his war on drugs. With victims numbering in the thousands (the conservative estimate is close to 8,000 but human rights groups say it might be as high as 30,000), the drug war was largely a war on the poor, powered by Duterte’s regularly televised ramblings, which egg the police and military on to kill, kill, kill, and thus in turn quickly transformed into his regime’s overriding policy of state violence.

Activists and community organizers, journalists and cultural workers were not spared. In August 2020, as Filipinos endured punishing lockdowns early into the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Democratic Front of the Philippines peace consultant and peasant leader Randall Echanis was murdered in Quezon City, his body bearing clear signs of torture. Among the twenty journalists killed under Duterte was Jesus Malabanan, a contributor to a Reuters investigation of Duterte’s drug war; he was killed in December 2021. The poet and activist Kerima Lorena Tariman, who went underground in 2018 to be part of the armed revolutionary movement, was killed by the military in Negros Occidental in August 2021. Her husband and fellow activist, the poet and musician Ericson Acosta, was killed by the military in the same province in November 2022.

Consistently ranked by Global Witness to be the most dangerous country in Asia for land or environmental defenders, the Philippines under Duterte saw multiple massacres of Indigenous peoples, peasants, farmers, and activists in rural communities, which are among the most militarized sites in the country. Seven out of 10 farmers in the Philippines are landless, and the struggle for genuine agrarian reform remains protracted. Indigenous peoples in the Philippines are the poorest of the poor, ranking highest in regard to poverty in the latest Philippine Statistics Authority survey. For protesting development aggression, defending their ancestral domains, and asserting their land rights, the most vulnerable Filipinos are treated with the most brutality by the state. In October 2018, nine peasants were killed in a land cultivation site organized by land-reform petitioners in a Negros Island hacienda. On the last day of 2020, police killed nine Indigenous leaders of the Tumandok community in Panay, whom they accused of being communists and resisting arrest. The Tumandok community has been protesting the billion-peso construction of the Jalaur Dam on their ancestral lands. Among the five killed in New Bataan, Davao de Oro, in February 2022 was Chad Booc, a volunteer community teacher who was an Indigenous rights and environmental activist.

Alongside the rising death toll there was an increase in arrests and detention. In February 2020, Frenchie Mae Cumpio, a journalist and the executive director of Eastern Vista, was arrested in Tacloban City on charges of the illegal possession of firearms and terrorism financing. Months after the murder of her father Randall, the writer and peasant organizer Amanda Echanis was detained with her infant son in Tuguegarao City, also for the illegal possession of firearms and explosives. This is a known tactic used against activists by the military, and it is a trumped-up charge, often involving planted evidence. It is a non-bailable offense, sentencing targets to prolonged incarceration, which is further abetted by the notorious inefficiency of the justice system. It takes an average of four years for political prisoners to undergo trial and judgment, based on data from the human rights groups Karapatan and Kapatid; both Cumpio and Echanis remain incarcerated to this day. According to Karapatan, of the 802 political prisoners at the end of Duterte’s presidency, 591 were arrested during his regime. The most high-profile among them was a sitting senator and staunch Duterte critic, Leila de Lima, who was arrested in 2017 and detained for over six years. Together with the shutdown of the country’s largest television network, ABS-CBN, preceded by multiple threats of its closure by the president, Duterte made it crystal clear that freedom of expression had its limits and they were bound by deference to his strongman rule.

The ascent of Marcos Jr. to the presidency was aided to a great extent by his family’s alliance with the Dutertes (Sara Duterte, Rodrigo’s daughter, is the current vice president), and halfway through his term, the markers of change, Khan writes in her report, “are not enough to make a meaningful difference to the state of freedom of expression in the Philippines.” Khan’s report spotlights “red-tagging,” or the practice of “labelling, naming or branding of groups or individuals as supporters, recruiters or members of the New People’s Army of the Communist Party of the Philippines,” as a grave threat to civil society, endangering, in particular, “those who are critical of government policies, advocate for human rights accountability and social justice or hold politically progressive views.” The state has long held such people as enemies, and has long sanctioned their repression in the name of anti-terrorist and counter-insurgency efforts. Randall Echanis’s history of incarceration is proof of this. First imprisoned under Ferdinand Marcos Sr. (the father of the current president), he was released shortly after the dictator’s ouster by the People Power Revolution in 1986. He was jailed a second time under -president Corazon Aquino, who was installed as president by the revolution that ousted Marcos Sr., and then Echanis was jailed a third time under president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Tariman was detained for a year under president Joseph Estrada. Acosta was jailed for two years under president Benigno Aquino III (son of former president Corazon). Echanis, Tariman, and Acosta were all killed under president Duterte, whose regime took red-tagging to new heights, making it fatal to many and a persistent scourge to even more.

Duterte himself, in a direct attack on academic freedom, red-tagged the University of the Philippines (UP) in November 2020, calling the premier state university a breeding ground for communists and threatening to defund it. Months later, the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) published a list on their social media sites, red-tagging UP alumni who were student leaders decades prior. Such tactics targeting academia, particularly an institution with a history of activism (UP lost some of its most promising young intellectuals to the brutality of Marcos Sr.’s martial law rule), crack down on knowledge production embedded in social realities, conflating the necessary critiques of the government that such knowledge engenders with subversion. The policing extended to libraries, as was the case with Kalinga State University and Isabela State University purging their libraries of books and materials related to the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, following a memo from the Commission on Higher Education-Cordillera Administrative Region pushing for the removal of “subversive” materials from library collections. It impacted authors and publishers, as was the case when in response to its red-tagging by known state mouthpieces, the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (Commission on the Filipino Language) issued a memo censoring its own books, halting the publication and distribution of five books it deemed subversive and anti-government.

With various government agencies issuing orders legitimizing red-tagging, the attacks on academic freedom, freedom of the press, and overall freedom of expression were rampant and systematic. Using the charge of terrorism financing, the Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) in 2021 froze the accounts of the peasant rights group Amihan National Federation of Peasant Women, along with eight other organizations. In 2022, the National Telecommunications Commission issued an order to internet service providers to block access to the alternative news outfit Bulatlat, driven by allegations of links to the New People’s Army; this was not an isolated incident, as 26 other websites were similarly rendered inaccessible. Even bookstores too were red-tagged, with two independent bookstores vandalized on the same day, with red paint spelling out “NPA” (the armed wing of the Communist Party) and “Terorista.”

While Duterte’s detention in The Hague is a milestone in the pursuit of justice for the victims of his bloody regime, it is not by any stretch of the imagination a demonstration of Marcos Jr.’s commitment to human rights, but rather a climactic point in the ongoing feud between the Marcoses and the Dutertes. The breakdown of their tactical alliance only affirms the two ruling clans’ shared history of subjecting the Philippines to reigns of terror and economic plunder, and their shared desire for retaining power immune to accountability. Marcos Jr., unsurprisingly, is silent on the atrocities of his father’s regime and unresponsive to the calls for justice for its many victims; under his watch, his family’s wealth remains largely ill-gotten and unreturned, their tax evasion charges unresolved, and the $2-billion judgement in the United States for damages to martial law victims unpaid. Marcos Sr. the dictator returned as Marcos Sr. the hero in 2016, twenty-seven years after his death, the rehabilitation of his family’s reputation greatly aided by the-then newly elected president Duterte, who, in authorizing the dictator’s controversial burial in the Libingan ng mga Bayani (Cemetery of Heroes), forcefully rewrote history in a grand symbolic gesture to glorify the predecessor he most vocally admired.

Marcos Jr. may have authorized the arrest of Duterte, but what Duterte institutionalized he has lauded and maintained. The legal and bureaucratic infrastructure set in place by Duterte to produce a chilling effect on freedom of expression and to legitimize suppression remains intact. Created by Duterte in 2018 to “implement the government’s ‘whole of nation’ approach in addressing the root causes of insurgencies,” the multi-agency body National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) immediately gained notoriety as the government’s apparatus for relentless red-tagging. The calls to abolish the NTF-ELCAC, which began soon after its establishment, continue to be made by various progressive groups and, more recently, by UN experts Khan and Ian Fry (Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights in the context of climate change). Marcos Jr., like his predecessor, has ignored these calls. Between July 2022 and December 2024, or only over two years into his presidency, Karapatan logged 3,706,431 victims of red-tagging, noting that targets “were threatened, put under surveillance and often pressured to surrender as armed rebels to bloat the ‘achievements’ of the NTF-ELCAC in justifying its demand for bigger budgets.” In the face of such massive human rights violations, Marcos Jr., however, has praised the agency as “successful” in countering terrorism and vowed to “continue to invest in this success.”

This display of support for the NTF-ELCAC diminishes the possibility for a review if not repeal of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020, a Duterte-era piece of legislation. Giving legal ballast to existing practices that erode human rights, including the warrantless arrest of those alleged to be terrorists as well as surveillance that risks overstepping the right to privacy, the law is another weapon for the state to wield against its own people in the guise of protecting them. With the existence of such mechanisms that threaten freedom of expression and an administration that keeps them firmly in place, it is hard to imagine the feasibility of the other recommendations in Khan’s report, including the ratification of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, the decriminalizing of libel in the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, or the adoption of the Human Rights Defenders Protection Act. In the event that such recommendations are realized, the infamous inefficiency of the justice system and the entrenched culture of impunity remain threats to their implementation.

In June 2025, a handwritten letter by detained journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio was delivered by the Committee to Protect Journalists to Geneva and read aloud by Khan in the United Nations headquarters. At twenty-six years old, Cumpio has already languished in jail for five years and, if found guilty, can face up to forty years in prison. “How do we even combat a well-orchestrated lie?” Cumpio writes. “People call us brave for holding on, although I would have to admit I sometimes feel otherwise.” To hear the exasperation in Cumpio’s words is to confront the suffering imposed by history repeating itself, again and again, the state holding freedom of expression hostage and subjecting it to the violence of ill logic that, repeated often enough, lands its target in jail: the activist is a terrorist is a criminal. But history also repeats itself: each generation is never without principled dissenters, never without those who risk their lives to expose the lie. Cumpio admits to not feeling brave sometimes, which nevertheless affirms that bravery remains. The fight for her freedom and for the many like her continues, which is also the same fight for a just world, where it is clear, between the fascist and the activist, who the criminal is and who is not, who the hero is and who is not. In this world, the expression of truth prevails and the rightful meanings of words are restored.