Since 1999, the Philippine government has been marking August as International Humanitarian Law (IHL) Month, with every 12th of August designated as IHL Day. Officially, the commemoration is designed to raise awareness about the importance of protecting civilians and hors de combat during armed conflict. Yet some of the most appalling atrocities have been perpetrated by the Duterte and Marcos Jr. ruling regimes on IHL month.
On August 10, 2020, National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) consultant and veteran peasant leader Randall Echanis was killed by suspected state agents in his apartment in Novaliches, Quezon City. Ka Randall, then 72, was killed while recovering from an illness. According to the forensic investigation, he suffered massive head injuries and at least 40 stab wounds to the body. Apart from the fatal stab wound to his back that damaged an artery, all the other stab wounds were superficial, indicating that he was severely tortured before being killed.
One week later, on August 17, 2020, Zara Alvarez, a paralegal and education director of Karapatan-Negros and a former student leader, teacher, church and community health worker, was gunned down near her home in Bacolod City. She was the 13th human rights worker killed under the fascist Duterte regime.
On August 19, 2022, Benito Tiamzon, a member of the National Democratic Front (NDFP) negotiating panel, and Wilma Austria-Tiamzon, an NDFP consultant, were intercepted in Catbalogan, Samar with eight companions aboard a vehicle, tortured and killed and their bodies sent adrift on a boat loaded with explosives that was later detonated at sea. The military claimed that the victims died in a mid-sea encounter.
On August 16, 2024 three alleged ranking members of the NDFP, Concha Araneta, Vivian Torrato and Vicente Hinojales, were killed by the military in a gunbattle in Lambunao, Iloilo. Yet the military inordinately delayed the turnover of the bodies of the deceased to their families, despite reports that the remains were already in advanced stages of decomposition.
That these horrific violations of human rights and IHL occurred on a month designed to drumbeat International Humanitarian Law and that these violations occurred across two regimes—that of Duterte and Marcos Jr.—show that utter contempt for IHL is a continuing phenomenon, and that both Duterte and his successor are war criminals.
Human rights defenders declare that the Marcos Jr. regime’s own litany of war crimes makes him unfit to even speak of IHL. Indeed, he said not a word about human rights in his State of the Nation Address.
On August 19, 2026, human rights defenders’ groups will set straight the narrative distorted by the regime’s propagandists by underscoring Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s culpability as a war criminal and citing anew the massacre by military troops on April 19, 2026 of ten hors de combat fighters of the New People’s Army and nine unarmed civilians on an immersion program in Toboso, Negros Occidental as the latest example of his regime’s brutality.
As early as May 2024, the Marcos Jr. regime was already pronounced guilty of war crimes by the International People’s Tribunal, a quasi-judicial body composed of international jurors and legal experts, for implementing the same US-inspired fascist and anti-people doctrines that drove Duterte’s counter-insurgency war. Marcos Jr.’s adamant refusal to abolish the NTF-ELCAC created under Duterte despite widespread calls to do so is evidence that he, in effect, is conducting his counter-insurgency war in a manner just as brutal and violative of human rights and international humanitarian law.
Like his predecessor Rodrigo Duterte, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. must be exposed for the war criminal that he is and held accountable for his crimes against humanity.