The Center for Trade Union and Human Rights (CTUHR) vehemently condemns the guilty verdict handed down today by the Tacloban Regional Trial Court (RTC) on journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio and humanitarian worker Marielle Domequil for terrorism financing charges. The guilty verdict extends the government persecution of Frenchie Mae and Marielle.

The pattern is very clear: Frenchie Mae and Marielle are victims of government persecution. They are victims of harassment and intimidation, red-tagging, an illegal raid, of planting of evidence, of trumped-up charges, and five years in jail without trial. Instead of stopping the persecution today, the Tacloban RTC has extended it, even threatening Cumpio and Domequil with 12 years of imprisonment.

Cumpio and Domequil are being persecuted for serving the marginalized, the peasant communities in Eastern Visayas, one of the country’s poorest regions. They are victims of the government’s conflation of independent and critical voices with the armed insurgency, which it further conflates with terrorism. In fighting the insurgency, the government has been undermining Filipinos’ basic freedoms and rights and the country’s democracy itself.

When will the persecution of Frenchie Mae and Marielle stop? The trumped-up murder charges filed against them have been junked in November 2025 for lack of evidence. The Tacloban RTC today junked the charges of illegal possession of firearms and explosives against them, as it should, because finding a hand grenade, a gun and a Communist flag under her pillow could be nothing but fiction.

Yet the Tacloban RTC found Frenchie Mae and Marielle guilty of terrorism financing. It is scraping the bottom of the barrel to continue the persecution of the two. Frenchie Mae and Marielle have credibly claimed that the cash found in their possession during the raid was from a fundraising campaign, an activity that community journalists in the country legitimately do.

How can the court believe witnesses that are supposedly rebel returnees but who are actually captives or under the payroll of the military or both? This ruling is a bad precedent for social movement activists and civil society personnel targeted with terrorism financing charges, as it upholds the false accusation that Frenchie Mae and Marielle delivered financial and logistical support to the New People’s Army on March 29, 2019, the NPA’s anniversary.

The ruling shows that the persecution of journalists, humanitarian workers and community organizers that was carried out by the Rodrigo Duterte regime is being continued by the Ferdinand Marcos Jr regime. Pressed by the local and international journalism and human rights community to free Frenchie Mae and Marielle, the Marcos Jr regime doubled down on its persecution.

We demand the immediate reversal of the guilty verdict, the freedom of Frenchie Mae and Marielle, the junking of the country’s Anti-Terrorism Law which the government weaponizes against independent and critical voices in society, the abolition of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) which has pushed strongly for the persecution of Frenchie Mae and Marielle, and Marcos Jr’s actions to protect human rights.