The Center for Trade Union and Human Rights (CTUHR) condemns the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict’s (NTF-ELCAC) statement on the June 2025 report on the Philippines submitted by Ms. Irene Khan, United Nations Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression and Opinion.

The anti-insurgency body’s statement is full of distortions about its role in the state of the freedom of expression and opinion in the country. It indicates the Ferdinand Marcos Jr government’s refusal to comply with the recommendations forwarded by Ms. Khan and deserves to be roundly criticized.

Despite its attempts to prettify its work, the NTF-ELCAC cannot claim in its statement that its mandate is to address the root causes of the armed insurgency by implementing much-needed social and economic reforms. Its statement clearly shows that its mandate is to counter the insurgency through a combination of violence and deception, which could only result in attacks on the freedom of expression and opinion.

In its statement, the NTF-ELCAC admits and tries to justify its practice of red-tagging. It rationalizes red-tagging as merely truth-telling, but is silent on the labor and human rights violations that red-tagging entails for labor and social activists and marginalized communities. It is silent on the chilling effect on students and the faithful that is created by its much-vaunted dialogues with universities and faith-based communities.

The NTF-ELCAC boasts about “sworn affidavits of cadres turned witnesses” and “voices of victims and survivors” but is silent about how it was able to extract these affidavits and voices. Filipinos have been observing the NTF-ELCAC for years and have seen how it has used monetary rewards and threats of retaliation against activists, rebels, and ordinary people to create its cache of lies.

The NTF-ELCAC’s lies cost people’s lives. In the labor sector alone, from 2016 to the present, 72 activists have been victims of extrajudicial killings, XXX activists have been victims of enforced disappearances, and 24 activists remain as political prisoners because of trumped-up charges and planted evidence. By red-tagging these individuals and their organizations the NTF-ELCAC virtually called for these human rights violations.

The NTF-ELCAC claims winning some “socioeconomic gains in the countryside” but can only cite bringing “roads, livelihood, education… into former rebel zones.” Much of the agency’s funding actually goes into disinformation and providing rewards for intelligence information about the insurgency. Roads, livelihood and education by themselves do not suffice as socioeconomic reforms in addressing poverty, hunger, landlessness and joblessness across the country.

The NTF-ELCAC failed miserably to respond to Ms. Khan’s statement that terrorism is defined, “according to resolutions of the United Nations, as acts against civilians committed with the intention of causing death or serious injury.” In the labor sector, all victims of human rights violations instigated by the NTF-ELCAC cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered terrorists in this definition.

CTUHR echoes Ms. Khan’s call for the abolition of the NTF-ELCAC. We cite her considered judgement on the issue: “For the sake of human rights, including freedom of expression, and peaceful reconciliation and because of the importance of decisively turning the page on past violations, the Government should consider the abolition of the task force.”