We are a new advocacy journalism organization that focuses entirely on human rights in the Philippines. We are nonprofit.
This website is a work in progress so please bear with us. In the meantime, if you have questions, queries, story ideas or pitches, let us know via this Proton email address rightsreportph.r3rc5@passmail.net or through Signal @RightsReportPH.48.
Carlos Conde
Editor
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Editor’s Note
For more than three decades, I have worked as a journalist and researcher in the Philippines, covering politics, conflict, corruption, and human rights. I have reported for The New York Times and numerous other publications, both domestic and international. After stepping back from active journalism in 2011, I served as a researcher at Human Rights Watch. Over the course of my career, I have interviewed presidents and generals — but I have also spent long days in rural villages, conflict zones, funeral parlors, and police stations, listening to families whose lives were shattered by violence, injustice, and the abuse of power.
I often tell friends and colleagues that living across those two worlds — journalism and human rights advocacy — was among the most formative experiences of my professional life. Each discipline deepened the other. My years in journalism laid the groundwork for a career in advocacy; my years in advocacy sharpened the lens through which I approach reporting.
Since leaving Human Rights Watch in August 2025, after nearly fourteen years documenting the abuses of a turbulent nation, I felt a strong pull back toward my journalistic roots — this time carrying what a human rights advocate’s particular set of skills brings to the work.
Founding Rights Report Philippines is my attempt to return to the kind of journalism that first drew me into this profession: slow, careful, field-based reporting that centers victims and evidence.
The Philippines continues to suffer from serious human rights abuses — extrajudicial killings, red-tagging, the harassment of journalists and activists, military violence in rural communities, and the steady erosion of civil liberties that shape the daily lives of ordinary Filipinos. Many of these stories never reach the front pages. Others vanish after a single news cycle.
This nonprofit journalism project exists to document these abuses in a sustained and systematic way. Here, we publish investigations, field reports, interviews, explainers, essays, and commentary examining what is happening on the ground, why it is happening, who bears responsibility, and how accountability might be achieved.
This is not my first engagement with human rights journalism. As a freelance journalist, my work has included numerous investigations into human rights violations in the Philippines, with bylines in CyberDyaryo, MindaNews, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, and others. In 2001, together with a small group of journalist and activist colleagues, I co-founded Bulatlat.com, now the country’s preeminent media organization covering human rights. Several years later, I established DavaoToday.com, which focuses on human rights issues in the southern Philippines.
I hope Rights Report Philippines will make a meaningful contribution to human rights journalism in my country.
Read some of my New York Times stories here and more here.
Read my HRW work here.