NEWS ANALYSIS: A critical ruling due on Monday, March 23, could test whether Philippine courts will keep sustaining charges that have already been thrown out in case after case — and force a reckoning with a national security apparatus that has treated due process as an obstacle rather than a right.
A TACLOBAN court is set to rule March 23 on motions to reconsider the terrorism financing conviction of journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio, and on her right to bail while she appeals a sentence of up to 18 years. After more than six years behind bars — most of it spent in pretrial detention — the outcome could be decisive, not just for her but for the dozens of aid workers, organizers, and community activists who have been swept up in the same legal machinery that imprisoned her.
The timing matters. Just weeks before the ruling, a regional trial court in Tacloban dismissed all terrorism financing charges against Jazmin Jerusalem, the 65-year-old executive director of the Leyte Center for Development and Empowerment (LCDE). The Feb. 27 ruling by Judge Georgina Uy Perez was sweeping: not only did it reject the charges against Jerusalem for lack of a legally operative terrorist designation at the time of the alleged acts, it dismissed the case with prejudice — meaning the prosecution cannot refile on the same facts. A week earlier, a separate Manila court had also lifted a provisional asset preservation order against LCDE after the Anti-Money Laundering Council failed to link the group’s accounts to any unlawful activity.
Together, these dismissals form a pattern that is increasingly difficult for the Philippine national security establishment to ignore. Courts across the country have rejected terrorism financing charges against activists, rural aid workers, labor organizers, and clergy — in most cases because the evidence was built on the unverified testimony of alleged former rebels, or on the legal fiction that domestic criminal liability could attach to a foreign terrorist designation that was never properly published in the Philippines.
What has not changed is the pace at which new charges continue to be filed.
These dismissals form a pattern that is increasingly difficult for the Philippine national security establishment to ignore.
UNDERSTANDING why these cases keep going even after courts throw them out requires understanding what the prosecution of terrorism financing in the Philippines has really been about.
In 2021, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global intergovernmental watchdog on money laundering and illicit finance, placed the Philippines on its “grey list,” a designation that signals deficiencies in a country’s systems to combat terrorism financing and money laundering, and subjects it to increased international scrutiny. For a government that had pledged to deliver the country off that list, the pressure was enormous and the solution, it turned out, was simple: prosecute more people. And who better to target than those they’ve always targeted: activists?
Human Rights Watch warned in February 2025 that Philippine authorities were using FATF’s grey-listing as cover to file “baseless terrorism-financing charges against civil society groups and activists.” The report’s findings were blunt: most of the cases involved not genuine terrorist financing but people and groups accused of links to the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army — aid workers, journalists, clergy, union officials, humanitarian organizations — based largely on testimonies from alleged rebel defectors whose claims courts have repeatedly found to be uncorroborated.
The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism obtained a police memorandum that made the strategy explicit. The operation to build terrorism financing cases against activists was codenamed “Project Exit the Greylist.”
The Philippines was removed from the FATF grey list in February 2025. The cases against activists and humanitarian groups have not stopped.
As the HRW World Report 2026 documented, even after the FATF delisting, new terrorism financing charges continued to be filed against civil society organizations and their members. The machinery, once built, does not stand down.
Who better to target than those they’ve always targeted: activists?
IN THE Jerusalem case, prosecutors relied on affidavits from four alleged former rebels who claimed she had funneled LCDE’s development funds to the NPA. The court found no independent evidence of any conspiracy, and noted that co-conspirator testimony, under Philippine rules of evidence, cannot stand alone without corroboration. It also found that no valid domestic terrorist designation existed at the time the alleged acts were committed. A foreign or supranational designation, the court ruled, cannot have legal force in the Philippines unless it has been published in accordance with the Terrorism Financing Prevention and Suppression Act.
These are not technicalities. They are the minimum requirements for criminal prosecution in a constitutional democracy.
In the Cumpio case, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) investigated the evidence and found indicators that the weapons cited in the original charges had been planted. Cumpio herself testified that she and her co-accused were forced to turn away during the raid. The court ultimately acquitted her on the firearms and explosives charges — the same charges that justified her initial detention and the denial of bail for years. It then convicted her on the terrorism financing charge, relying on witnesses RSF said were “under the close watch of the military” and had appeared in multiple similar prosecutions.
That conviction is now the subject of the March 23 motion for reconsideration.
The National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers (NUPL), which has handled several of these cases, described the pattern bluntly: “Terrorism and terrorism financing laws are being used against human rights defenders and their organizations. This is lawfare, and its purpose is to paralyze the operations of organizations like LCDE that provide services to sectors and communities in isolated areas.”
A 2025 joint study by NUPL and the Council for People’s Development and Governance found that 31% of civil society organizations surveyed had been accused of terrorism financing without basis, 62% experienced red-tagging, and 57% reported physical surveillance.
These are not technicalities. They are the minimum requirements for criminal prosecution in a constitutional democracy.
THE GLOBAL response to Cumpio’s case has been substantial. Five UN experts, including Special Rapporteur Ben Saul, described her conviction as “deeply troubling” and called for her release on bail pending appeal. UN Special Rapporteur Irene Khan has flagged the excessive length of her pretrial detention. More than 340 journalists and journalism unions have called on President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to secure her freedom. The One Free Press Coalition listed her case among the world’s 10 most urgent press freedom situations in 2025.
All of this attention is warranted, even though much of it came late. But it also reflects a persistent tendency in international press freedom advocacy to center the journalist at the expense of the broader story.
Frenchie Mae Cumpio’s case is not, at its core, a press freedom case. It is a civil society case in which a journalist happens to be the most prominent victim. Her co-accused, Marielle Domequil — a church lay worker convicted alongside her and sentenced to the same 12 to 18 years — has received a fraction of the international attention, despite being in precisely the same legal jeopardy and having spent the same six years behind bars.
And Cumpio and Domequil are just two of dozens. Jerusalem, a UN award-winning disaster relief worker who has served Eastern Visayas communities since the 1980s, especially in the wake of the devastation of typhoon Haiyan in 2013, spent more than a year under active prosecution before the charges were dismissed. Community journalist Deo Montesclaros of Pinoy Weekly faces terrorism financing charges in Cagayan Valley. Felipe Gelle, a farmers’ rights advocate, faces similar charges in Negros Occidental, even as courts have already dismissed identical charges against his colleagues. The Cebu-based Community Empowerment Resource Network was forced to dissolve entirely after the government filed terrorism financing charges against 27 of its staff members and froze its accounts.
Press freedom organizations framing this primarily as an attack on journalism — and directing their campaigns almost exclusively at Cumpio — inadvertently reinforce the government’s own implicit argument: that this is an isolated case involving a particular individual, rather than a systematic campaign against organized civil society. That framing lets the government manage the optics by pointing to Marcos’ stated commitment to press freedom, while the machine grinds on against everyone else.
The real story is the machine.
Press freedom organizations framing this primarily as an attack on journalism inadvertently reinforce the government’s own implicit argument: that this is an isolated case involving a particular individual, rather than a systematic campaign against organized civil society.
THE National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), is the institutional engine behind most of these prosecutions. It is a state body that coordinates military, police, and prosecutorial action against organizations it designates as communist fronts — a process that requires no judicial finding, no due process, and no standard of evidence. Red-tagging by NTF-ELCAC has preceded virtually every terrorism financing prosecution involving civil society.
Marcos has repeatedly pledged to uphold press freedom while affirming he will never abolish NTF-ELCAC. That is not a contradiction he appears troubled by.
International pressure, to date, has been largely declaratory. UN rapporteurs issue statements. Coalition letters circulate. Press freedom rankings are cited — the Philippines placed 116th out of 180 countries in the 2025 RSF World Press Freedom Index. None of this has been sufficient to compel either an acquittal in Cumpio’s case or a genuine reform of the prosecution architecture.
What has worked, no matter how imperfectly, are the courts.
In case after case, judges have found that the evidence in these cases cannot withstand scrutiny. That is not nothing. But courts cannot reform a system on their own, especially when prosecutors keep filing and the Anti-Money Laundering Council keeps freezing assets regardless of what courts do. Jerusalem’s funds, for instance, remain frozen even after both the terrorism financing case and the asset forfeiture case against her were dismissed. The AMLC has not returned them.
Courts need to apply their own rulings consistently and with prejudice where the facts warrant — as the Jerusalem dismissal did. The AMLC needs to unfreeze what the courts have already cleared. The FATF, whose compliance framework has been explicitly weaponized by the Philippine government, must be pressed by its member states – all of them from developed countries, mostly from Europe – to enforce its own Recommendation 8, which requires governments to take a risk-based approach that does not harm legitimate nonprofit activity. Prosecution volume is not a measure of institutional integrity. Donor countries that have provided the Philippines with technical assistance on terrorism financing — Australia chief among them — should take that seriously.
The March 23 ruling is a test of whether Philippine courts will sustain what is, by now, a visibly failing campaign — one that has generated dismissal after dismissal, drawn condemnation from the United Nations and other bodies, and left innocent people in pretrial detention for years at a time, without the most basic guarantee of bail. The courts have been saying no. The question is who else in the government will. (Rights Report Philippines)
