On the eve of the campaign period for the 2025 midterm elections, Karapatan called on Filipino voters to resoundingly reject candidates and partylists with abominable records of human rights violations.
“The common denominator of these candidates is their direct hand in the atrocities committed against the Filipino people. We appeal to the people not to vote for these human rights violators,” said KARAPATAN secretary general Cristina Palabay.
The human rights alliance warned against senatorial candidates and partylist groups involved in the bloody drug war campaign, the killings and enforced disappearance of activists and red-tagging.
Palabay also added that these candidates, based on their record, will do nothing to attain justice for victims of rights violations and exact accountability from the perpetrators.
KARAPATAN cited the following senatorial candidates:
Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa and Christopher “Bong” Go – as Rodrigo Duterte’s minions, both are deeply involved in their master’s drug war, a fact further exposed in the series of Quad Committee hearings at the House of Representatives;
Imee Marcos – who benefited immensely from her family’s thievery and seen as accountable for the 1977 killing of activist Archimedes Trajano, who was tortured and summarily executed by her bodyguards after he questioned Imee Marcos at a public forum on her qualification to head the Kabataang Barangay;
Apollo Quiboloy – a cult leader, racketeer, human trafficker and Duterte crony currently facing criminal cases, including trafficking in persons, in court;
Allen Capuyan – a former colonel with the Intelligence Service of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (ISAFP) who later became executive director of the National Secretariat of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) under Duterte, making him one of the foremost red-taggers endangering the lives, liberty and security of targeted activists;
Rodante Marcoleta – among the congressmen who voted to deny the renewal of ABS-CBN’s franchise. He also infamously proposed to drastically slash the budget of the Commission on Human Rights for failing to protect President Rodrigo Duterte against criticisms of his bloody drug war. He has been expelled from five committees in the current Congress for trying to block attempts by fellow lawmakers to probe Vice President Sara Duterte’s misuse of public funds;
Norberto Gonzales – who served as Gloria Arroyo’s national security adviser and secretary of national defense, shares responsibility for the tremendous human rights violations that marked the Arroyo regime. By the end of Arroyo’s term, she and her national security officials were responsible for 1,206 extrajudicial killings and more than 200 enforced disappearances.
Karapatan also flagged the following partylist groups:
Duterte Youth – perpetrator of nonstop red-tagging; its nominees have strong links to the AFP and military institutions;
Epanaw Sambayanan – nominees of this partylist group include elements of the NTF-ELCAC, the main red-tagging machinery of the government.
Other partylists with nominees who are engaged in red-tagging, instigation of trumped-up charges against activists, supportive of reinstating the death penalty, pushing for the continuation of the bloody drug war, or worse, directly involved in cases of killings and rights violations are BG Party-list, Frontliners Party-list, and 4th Faction Party-list.
“We ask the public to be vigilant against the lies and deceptions that these candidates will spread during the campaign period,” said Palabay.