By Karapatan
Whatever glittering words Ferdinand Marcos Jr. delivers in his fourth State of the Nation Address (SONA) will fail to enthrall. Casting a pall on his SONA is the calamitous effect his three-year rule has had on the people’s civil and political rights.
Contrary to his cultivated image of a president who respects human rights, Marcos Jr.’s three-year rule has been marked with rampant violations of human rights and international humanitarian law (IHL). As of June 2025, there have been 129 extrajudicial killings (EJK), 15 enforced disappearances and 288 illegal or arbitrary arrests under his watch.
In the countryside where a civil war rages, Karapatan has documented 67,024 cases of indiscriminate firing, 51,206 cases of indiscriminate bombing and 45,097 cases of forced evacuation perpetrated in the course of a brutal counter-insurgency war, and all of them violative of IHL which is meant to protect civilians amid armed conflict. The most grievous IHL violations, however, have been the extrajudicial killings of civilians in the countryside who are falsely portrayed by the military as rebels killed in armed clashes with soldiers.
Marcos Jr. implements to the hilt his predecessor Rodrigo Duterte’s fascist policies and directives like Executive Order No. 70 which created the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC). The NTF-ELCAC, wielding the so-called whole of nation approach, has been at the forefront of red- and terror-tagging activists and other dissenters and forcing civilians to surrender as armed rebels. There have been at least 571 documented cases of forced or fake surrenders and as many as 10,225,414 cases of threats, harassment and intimidation, most of them in the form of red-tagging, in three years of Marcos Jr.’s rule.
It is under Marcos Jr.’s watch that the Anti-Terror Act of 2020 (passed under Duterte) and the Terrorist Financing Prevention and Suppression Act of 2012 (passed under Benigno Aquino III) are being weaponized to the fullest. Five years after the enactment of the Anti-Terrorism Act, at least 227 individuals have been arbitrarily designated as “terrorists” or slapped with trumped-up terrorism cases, most of them under the current regime. Twenty of those charged are still in prison, while three have been forcibly disappeared. Seventeen development organizations and church-based groups have had their bank accounts frozen, severely disrupting or halting altogether projects and services in impoverished communities.
These repressive measures have gravely curtailed the people’s exercise of freedom of expression and freedom of association and further constricted an already shrinking civic space.
Marcos Jr.’s militarist approach to eliminating dissent has engendered numerous violations of human rights and IHL and has only succeeded in fuelling unrest. It does nothing to address the real roots of the armed conflict and leaves no room for political settlement through peace talks.
Worse, a pervasive culture of impunity shields public officials, officers, soldiers, police and paramilitary elements who have perpetrated violations of human rights and IHL. Despite the tens of thousands killed in Duterte’s war on drugs, efforts by the victims’ families to seek justice for their kin have come to naught. Such glaring injustice has forced victims to bring their grievances to other institutions like the United Nations Human Rights Committee and the International Criminal Court. Marcos Jr.’s own anti-narcotics campaign has resulted in more than a thousand people killed, while his administration continues to implement the Duterte-era operational pl;ans Tokhang and Double Barrel.
Impunity rears its ugly head even in the case of Sara Duterte, whose impeachment trial for misusing hundreds of millions of pesos in Confidential and Intelligence Funds (CIF), among other high crimes, has been scuttled. Marcos Jr. was acutely aware that punishing Sara Duterte’s misuse of public funds would ultimately backfire on every other corrupt politician, including himself and others within the ruling clique.
In his state visit to the US, Marcos Jr. unhesitatingly acceded to US-dictated security arrangements that not only further propped up his regime’s brutal counter-insurgency war with more funds and war materiel. With Marcos Jr. agreeing to turn the country into a weapons and logistical depot for the US military, he also drew the country deeper into the vortex of US hegemonistic designs against China and made the Filipino people potential targets of military reprisals.
Marcos Jr. also violated the Filipino people’s economic rights by acceding to a US-imposed 19% tariff on Philippine exports to the US and a tariff-free regime for US imports to the Philippines. This grotesquely unequal exchange that will have severe impacts on workers in export-oriented enterprises comes on top of Marcos Jr.’s anti-worker stance of refusing to legislate a national living wage for Filipino workers that would enable them to cope with spiralling inflation.
Ferdinand Marcos Jr. will try to smother these glaring truths in his SONA.
But the people who have suffered through his calamitous reign will see through Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s lies. They will not be deceived.
On his fourth State of the Nation Address, the Filipino people will march to denounce Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and his disastrous policies and reverberate their demands for an end to militarization and the violation of the people’s rights, a stop to the weaponization of terror laws against the people, the abolition of the NTF-ELCAC and its vicious red-tagging spree, and the adoption of measures to mitigate the people’s economic suffering.
