Rights group KARAPATAN denounced the Marcos Jr. regime’s National Action Plan for Unity, Peace and Development (NAP-UPD), a counter-insurgency program that will worsen violations of human rights and IHL, with the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) as one of the lead agencies, calling it a “national plan for state terrorism.”
In truth, 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 on the rise under the Marcos Jr. regime. As of June 2025, Karapatan has documented 51,206 victims of bombing; 67,204 victims of indiscriminate firing; and 45,097 victims of forced evacuation, all in the course of the Marcos Jr. regime’s counter-insurgency war.
The Marcos Jr. regime continues to implement the same fascist policies created under Duterte that call for stepping up the counter-insurgency drive that has been responsible for worsening violations of human rights and IHL. The proposed budget for the Department of National Defense (DND) in 2026 is 13% higher than the DND budget in 2025. Intensified air to ground assaults in peasant and indigenous communities can be expected with the Philippine Air Force’s recent acquisition of additional
Black Hawk combat helicopters that will no doubt victimize civilians, dislocate them economically and inflict mental and psychological trauma.
In addition to terrorizing peasant and indigenous communities, the NAP-UPD will likewise target human rights defenders’ groups, people’s organizations and grassroots-oriented development groups it categorizes as “communist front organizations”. This categorization which maliciously associates legal democratic organizations with armed rebel groups is meant to justify violent attacks against them by state forces. The planned NAP-UPD crackdowns on legal democratic organizations are also meant to silence dissent and further shrink the already constricted civic space.
Ferdinand Marcos Jr. may boast that the country is a signatory to the Geneva Conventions and has enacted RA 9851 or the Philippine Act on Crimes Against International Humanitarian Law, Genocide and Other Crimes Against Humanity as far back as 2009.
Formal adherence to IHL, however, has never guaranteed substantial adherence to its principles. Since its inception, for instance, RH 9852 has been weaponized by the state against activists and civilians being linked to the New People’s Army. Prosecutors based in so-called “conflict areas” have, in fact, been receiving special training on how to use the law against persons being linked to the armed conflict in order to criminalize dissenters, political activists and even ordinary civilians and maliciously portray them as IHL violators as well.
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 turns a blind eye on the hundreds and thousands of victims of such violations and focuses instead on probing complaints of IHL violations filed by the military against dissenters.
As long as Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s policies on addressing the armed conflict mirror those of his predecessor Rodrigo Duterte, the escalating violations of human rights and international humanitarian law under his regime will continue to expose him as a hypocrite and give his grand pronouncements on championing IHL a hollow ring.