The Philippines hosts a vibrant political landscape, and elections are free from overt restrictions. However, established political elites benefit from structural advantages, and problems including highly organized disinformation campaigns and widespread vote buying have undermined fair competition. Corruption is endemic, and anticorruption bodies struggle to uphold their mandates. Journalists and activists who are perceived as critical of the government or other powerful interests can face criminal cases and extralegal violence. Terrorist and insurgent activity continues on the southern island of Mindanao. Abuses by police and military personnel remain a concern. While the levels of violence and impunity decreased somewhat after a new administration took office in 2022, harmful practices such as “red-tagging”—the denunciation of government critics as supposed communists—have persisted.

• Congressional hearings and criminal investigations during the year continued to uncover human rights abuses linked to former President Rodrigo Duterte. Former law enforcement officials testified that Duterte had overseen reward payments to police officers who carried out extrajudicial killings as part of his war on drugs. In June, former Senator Leila de Lima, a human rights lawyer and prominent critic of Duterte, was acquitted of all remaining drug charges, which were widely seen as fabricated by the Duterte administration. Separately, Apollo Quiboloy, a pastor and Duterte associate who headed the influential Kingdom of Jesus Christ church, was charged in March and arrested in September for a number of alleged offenses, including the sex trafficking of children.
• Amid a widening political rift between President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Vice President Sara Duterte, the former president’s daughter refused to answer questions from lawmakers about her vice presidential office’s annual budget request, including at a live hearing in August. The vice president had previously faced criticism for her office’s opaque use of “confidential” funds, though President Marcos’s requests for such funds were approved without similar scrutiny.
• In June, the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) confirmed that Alice Guo, mayor of Bamban since 2022, was not a citizen of the Philippines but a Chinese national. She was accused of links to a network of Chinese-owned online scam operations in the area. The NBI reported in July that some 1,200 suspected Chinese nationals had improperly obtained Philippine birth certificates in Davao del Sur Province since 2016, raising further concerns about the threat of Chinese organized crime and espionage. Also in June, Chinese coast guard forces engaged in a violent confrontation with Filipino military personnel as they attempted to resupply a garrison in the Spratly Islands.
• In two August cases that cast doubt on the integrity of electoral institutions ahead of congressional balloting in 2025, former Commission on Elections Chairman Andres Bautista was indicted in the United States for alleged money laundering and receipt of bribes from a vote-counting machine company in connection with the 2016 elections, and current Chairman George Garcia was charged in the Philippines with improperly awarding a contract to another such company. Separately, in a series of rulings in October, the Sandiganbayan, the country’s anticorruption court, dismissed a 2014 case against politician Juan Ponce Enrile—a close associate of former President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and now the chief legal counsel for the current president—as well as one of many decades-old ill-gotten wealth cases against the late Marcos Sr. and his wife Imelda Marcos.
• Red-tagging remained a serious problem throughout 2024. The Ateneo Human Rights Center documented 456 red-tagging incidents in the first half of the year. In May, the Supreme Court ruled that red-tagging represented a threat to life, liberty, and security, and that individual cases could prompt courts to issue a writ of amparo, which enables specific remedies such as orders of protection. In July and August, two journalists in Masbate Province who had raised graft allegations against provincial authorities were charged with murders and accused of being communist rebels, but local courts found a lack of evidence for the charges.

This report has been abridged for Freedom in the World 2025 due to ongoing budget constraints. Freedom in the World is entirely funded by nongovernmental sources such as private foundations, corporations, and individuals like you. Please consider making a donation to support future editions of this vital resource.

For additional background information, see last year’s full report.