KARAPATAN STATEMENT ON INTL HUMAN RIGHTS DAY 2025

[KARAPATAN Public Information]

PRESS RELEASE

December 10, 2025

Reference: Cristina Palabay, KARAPATAN secretary general, 09173162831

KARAPATAN Public Information Desk, 09189790580

KARAPATAN: Denounce the fascist, corrupt, and oppressive US-Marcos regime

The Filipino people will take to the streets once again on December 10th, International Human Rights Day, to denounce the Marcos Jr. regime’s growing violations of human rights and international humanitarian law (IHL) and rage against the large-scale bureaucratic corruption that now marks this government as among the most rotten in the country’s history.

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. Filipinos also face the looming danger of war as the puppet Marcos Jr. regime increasingly allows its US master to use the Philippines as a pawn in its rivalry with China for geopolitical dominance in the Asia-Pacific region.

The Marcos Jr. regime has consistently responded with repression as we rise to resist transgressions on people’s rights. Since Marcos Jr. took power in July 2022, his security forces have been 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. There have also been 48,247 victims of forced evacuation and millions of victims of threats, harassment and intimidation, including redtagging.

International humanitarian law, which is supposed to protect civilians during armed conflict, has been consistently violated by the Marcos Jr. regime as 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.

Political prisoners are 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. They include 12 consultants and staff of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) treacherously arrested since Marcos Jr.’s predecessor Rodrigo Duterte scuttled peace talks with the revolutionary movement. Their arrests are also in violation of signed agreements like the Joint Agreement on Safety and Immunity Guarantees (JASIG) and the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law.

The Marcos Jr. regime has also increasingly weaponized the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) and its evil twin, the Terrorism Financing Prevention and Suppression Act (TFPSA), to clamp down on dissent. 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. Thirty-four individuals, including NDFP consultants and leaders of people’s organizations, have been arbitrarily designated as “terrorists.” Two are victims of enforced disappearance.

But there is method to this madness. In May 2025, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. issued the National Action Plan for Unity, Peace and Development (NAP-UPD), his blueprint for stamping out all dissent, with the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) as its lead agency. With the NTF-ELCAC at the helm, the Marcos Jr. 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. 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.

The NAP-UPD was not forged in a vacuum. For decades, repressive anti-people programs drawn up by Philippine regimes have hewn to US counter-insurgency doctrines. 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. 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. This, however, seriously endangers the security and welfare of the Filipino people who may be engulfed in a conflict not of their own making.

As if these were not enough, explosive revelations of bureaucratic corruption involving not only senators, congressmen and other government officials but Ferdinand Marcos Jr. himself and his allies have enraged the people no end. Long before the corruption scandal exploded, Marcos Jr. was already accountable for flexing his power to recover his family’s ill-gotten wealth from sequestration as well as his failure to pay his family’s multi-billion peso estate tax obligations. He created the Maharlika wealth fund using government monies as seed capital to invest in big-ticket projects that, many suspect, are being used to launder the Marcoses’ ill-gotten wealth recovered from their stashes overseas and rake in billions of pesos in kickbacks and profits in the process. This, while Marcos Jr. embarks on an evil revisionist mission to portray his father’s brutal and kleptocratic rule as a “golden era” of Philippine history.

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.

Every peso stolen by bureaucrat capitalists is a peso diverted from urgently needed social services for our people. The systemic roots of corruption are increasingly evident as the people realize that none of the other constitutionally mandated successors have the moral ascendancy to rule, and neither do any of those from traditional political dynasties who keep on commanding the fraud-ridden elections.

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.

We, the people, hold the answer in our hands.

On the 10th of December, we march in the streets nationwide to renew our demands for real justice and accountability. Not only Sara Duterte and her clique but the top man in Malacañang and his minions must be exposed and punished for corruption.

We shall rally in defense of the civil and political rights that Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte have ruthlessly trampled on.

We shall clamor for an end to the fascism, corruption and puppetry of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte and to raise calls for genuinely patriotic and democratic alternatives emanating from the people themselves.

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Alliance for the Advancement of People's Rights

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Diliman, Quezon City, PHILIPPINES 1101

Telefax: (+63 2) 4354146

Web: http://www.karapatan.org

KARAPATAN is an alliance of human rights organizations and programs, human rights desks and committees of people’s organizations, and individual advocates committed to the defense and promotion of people’s rights and civil liberties.  It monitors and documents cases of human rights violations, assists and defends victims and conducts education, training and campaign.