UN Special Rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression Irene Khan strongly urged the Marcos regime to end the culture of impunity, red-tagging and vilification of human rights defenders, attacks on journalists and state repression, in her final report to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland last June 19.
Khan cited the more than 450 incidents of Red-tagging in the first half of 2024, with 61% of these perpetrated and instigated by state agencies such as NTF-Elcac and the killings of 117 journalists in the past three decades. Khan visited the Philippines in 2024 and after rigorous consultations with Philippine government officials, including state security forces, and several civil society organizations, strongly recommended the abolition of the fascist NTF-Elcac. Khan also urged the Philippine government to rejoin the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court.
The US-Marcos regime’s virtual department of fascist propaganda, the NTF-Elcac gets billions of pesos to conjure lies against dissenters and activists and falsely label them as supporters or sympathizers of the armed revolutionary movement. These are often made without evidence but with the perverse intention of harassing, instilling fear and consequently paving the way for the killings of rights advocates and activists regardless of affiliation.
Khan also cited the recent murder in General Santos City in Mindano of former broadcaster and human rights worker Ali Macalintal, who was a strongly advocate for the Moro-Lumad community and who had been red-tagged and had received death threats. Khan, in addition, called attention to the continuing unjust detention in Tacloban City Jail in Leyte province of investigative journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio on trumped-up terrorism charges.
At the same time, Philippine human rights group under the Philippine UPR Watch submitted an alternative report to the UN Human Rights Committee, detailing extrajudicial killings, illegal arrests, Red-tagging, and the filing of trumped-up cases as forms of judicial harassment and attacks on citizens’ economic rights. They called on the UN member states stop giving aid to the Philippine state.
The UPR Watch specifically denounced the NTF-Elcac’s response, which they described was replete with lies.
Human rights group Karapatan emphasized: “The NTF-ELCAC’s convoluted concept of “peace and development” means that everything it does – from red-tagging to threats, from abductions and enforced disappearances and fake surrenders, to killings and bombings – should be accepted as long as it wipes out any communist, dissenter, or social change advocate. The forest is about a democracy where rights and freedoms are respected, without the climate of fear and impunity, and it is precisely this forest that the NTF ELCAC tries to burn down through its fascist approach and means”.
“The Marcos administration’s NTF-ELCAC and its government organized groups and paid hacks are the only ones claiming that what it does is “truth-telling.” Stories from the ground belie their twisted narratives. Farmers and rural poor suffer from fake surrenders, their lives and livelihoods disrupted by so-called NTF-ELCAC’s projects,” Karapatan’s Secretary General Cristina Palabay stressed.