KARAPATAN denounces the hypocrisy of the Marcos Jr. regime for projecting itself as a “champion” of international humanitarian law (IHL), in the middle of enforcing a so-called National Action Plan for Unity, Peace and Development (NAP-UPD), a counter-insurgency program that serves as the blueprint for systematic violations of IHL, with the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) as one of the lead agencies.
The NAP-UPD blatantly flouts the principle of distinction under IHL by categorizing human rights defenders’ groups, people’s organizations and grassroots-oriented development groups as “communist terrorist group front organizations” (CTGFO). Branding such groups as CTGFO deliberately associates them with the New People’s Army (NPA), marking them as “legitimate” targets of violent attack by state forces. The planned NAP-UPD crackdowns on legal democratic organizations are meant to silence dissent and will further shrink the already constricted civic space.
Bombings, forced evacuations, military encampments in civilian homes and facilities, hamletting, and the imposition of de facto martial law in the countryside that dislocate entire communities are often triggered by brief skirmishes between the military and the NPA and are acts that endanger civilians and violate the principle of proportionality under IHL.
Ferdinand Marcos Jr. also likes to boast of RA 9851 or the Philippine Act on Crimes Against International Humanitarian Law, Genocide and Other Crimes Against Humanity enacted in 2009. Since its inception, however, this law has been weaponized by the state against activists and civilians accused of supporting the NPA. Prosecutors based in the provinces have, in fact, been receiving special training on how to use the law against persons being linked to the armed conflict. Dissenters and political activists are not just criminalized, they are maliciously portrayed as IHL violators who trample on human dignity and inflict human suffering.
Labor organizer Ernesto Jude Rimando Jr., who died of liver cancer in June 2024 while in detention, was facing, among others, charges of “murder and violation of international humanitarian law.” According to Rimando, the military accused him of murdering a member of their Special Forces who was classified as hors de combat. They alleged that he carried out the act under the orders of Jose Maria Sison, Benito Tiamzon, Wilma Austria, and Roger Posadas, which Rimando found absurd given that he was just a union and labor organizer.
In June 2021, Narciso Jao, a habal-habal driver from Pio Corpus, Masbate, was arrested for violation of RA 9851. The military accused Jao, a civilian, of being a militia member or a “part-time guerrilla” of the NPA.
Even the task force created in 2012 under Administrative Order No. 35 ostensibly to investigate the extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, torture and other grave human rights violations committed against activists has not only notoriously failed to attain justice for the hundreds and thousands of victims of such violations. Its focus has been on probing complaints of IHL violations filed by the military against “CTGs.”
Ferdinand Marcos Jr. can tout the creation of one task force after another and host IHL conferences on a grand scale to make it appear that human rights and IHL issues are being squarely addressed under his watch. But no amount of window-dressing can obscure the fact that his policies, crafted under Duterte, and his brutal counter-insurgency drive are fertile ground for the escalating violations of human rights and international humanitarian law that mark his regime.