UN Experts Urged to Call Out Anti-Terrorism Frameworks by UN, FATF that Enabled Targetting of Journalist, Activists
These frameworks played a role in the surge in the number of terrorism financing cases filed by the Philippine government over the years. Many of those complaints are based on bogus evidence.
UNITED Nations special rapporteurs are calling for the immediate release on bail of journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio and human rights defender Marielle Domequil following their conviction in the Philippines on charges of financing terrorism, but critics say the UN expert’s intervention is undercut by the body’s own role in building the legal framework used against them.
“Frenchie and Marielle have suffered six years of pre-trial detention and a fraught legal process with a string of charges that have been widely criticised as baseless and in retaliation for their human rights work,” the experts said in a statement issued from Geneva on Friday. “At a minimum, they should be released on bail while they pursue their appeal.”
The two women were arrested on February 7, 2020, following months of “red-tagging” and harassment attributed to state agents. They were initially charged with illegal possession of firearms and explosives and held without the possibility of bail. A year and a half after their arrest, an additional charge of financing terrorism was filed. Judicial proceedings did not begin until November 11, 2024 — nearly five years after their detention. In January 2026, the Regional Trial Court of Tacloban City acquitted them of all charges except financing terrorism, for which they now face between 12 and 18 years in prison.
“Given the serious concerns about the unconscionable length of time that the two young women have already spent in detention and the lack of due process, but also a possibility now of provisional release, we urge the court to grant them bail without any further delay,” the experts said. “Frenchie and Marielle deserve to be free to fight for justice.”
The statement was issued by five rapporteurs covering freedom of expression, counter-terrorism, freedom of assembly, human rights defenders, and judicial independence. The experts said they are in contact with the Philippine government on the matter.
But Ephraim Cortez, a lawyer and president of the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers (NUPL), while welcoming the statement, pointed to what he called a glaring omission, one that cuts to the heart of the UN’s credibility on the issue.
“The counter-terrorism laws, together with court processes, were used as a legal cover to justify the search, and the eventual arrest of Frenchie and Marielle,” Cortez said. “They were targeted not because they were engaged in any terrorism or financing terrorism activities, but because it was part of the government’s strategy to stifle dissent.”
Cortez noted that the Philippine government’s counter-terrorism measures were designed and implemented in accordance with the UN’s own global counter-terrorism strategy — the very framework that one of the five rapporteurs who signed the statement, Ben Saul, is mandated to help implement.
Adopted by consensus in 2006 through UN General Assembly Resolution 60/288, the strategy rests on four pillars: measures to address the conditions conducive to the spread of terrorism; measures to prevent and combat terrorism; measures to build state capacity; and measures to ensure respect for human rights and the rule of law as the fundamental basis of counter-terrorism.
That fourth pillar, which is supposed to serve as the strategy’s human rights safeguard, has long been criticized as the weakest of the four. In practice, the human rights and rule of law pillar is widely regarded as profoundly under-resourced and lacking the institutional capacity to deliver on its objectives within the global counter-terrorism architecture. Critics note that human rights in the context of the UN’s counter-terrorism work is most often minimized to a generic line in a resolution, under-funded in its programming, and scattered across overlapping mandates without sufficient resources or support.
This structural weakness, advocates argue, is precisely what makes the framework exploitable. Saul, the UN’s own special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, has warned of the “rampant weaponization of overly broad terrorism offenses against civil society, including political opponents, activists, human rights defenders, journalists, minorities, and students.”
Compounding the problem, NUPL’s Cortez said, is the role of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the intergovernmental body that sets global standards for combating terrorist financing. The FATF is formally integrated into the UN’s counter-terrorism coordination framework, having been included in the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Coordination Compact since it was launched by the Secretary-General in December 2018. Yet while the FATF rigorously evaluates member states on compliance with its financial monitoring recommendations, it imposes no standards and recommends no sanctions for human rights violations committed in the name of that compliance.
The consequences of that gap have been stark and well-documented in the Philippine context. Human Rights Watch reported that following the Philippines’ grey-listing by the FATF in 2021, the Philippine government ramped up its filing of terrorism financing cases, with its 2023–2027 national strategy on money laundering and terrorism financing prioritizing increased capacity to investigate and prosecute terrorism financing — steps that led to the removal of the Philippines off the grey list in early 2025. Most of those cases, HRW found, appeared to involve not actual terrorist networks but individuals and organizations accused of having links to the Communist Party of the Philippines — including workers and activists with civil society groups, clergy, and journalists.
The scale of the crackdown was sweeping. According to NUPL and allied groups, there was a 371% surge in the number of terrorism financing complaints filed by the Philippine government in 2024 alone, many of them aimed at progressive organizations involved in humanitarian work, agrarian reform, environmental advocacy, and community development. A confidential police memorandum obtained by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism made the government’s motivation explicit: the document linked the prosecution of at least one activist in the Ilocos region directly to an internal operation labeled “Project Exit the Greylist.”
While the FATF acknowledged the Philippines’ progress upon removing it from the grey list in February 2025, it also emphasized the need to ensure that counter-terrorism financing measures are appropriately applied and “are neither discouraging nor disrupting legitimate NPO activity.” That caveat did little to satisfy human rights groups.
NUPL criticized the FATF for congratulating the Philippines without acknowledging the rampant misuse of counter-terrorism financing laws to silence dissent and criminalize civil society, arguing that the surge in fabricated cases, arbitrary asset freezes, and financial exclusion were not unintended consequences of compliance but “deliberate tactics used to satisfy the FATF’s mandates at the cost of human rights.” HRW noted that even after the Philippines was removed from the grey list, new terrorism financing charges continued to be filed against civil society groups and activists.
“The global strategy, and the FATF recommendations, are being used by the Philippine government as a weapon against dissent,” Cortez said.
Cortez called on the Special Rapporteurs to go beyond advocating for individual cases and formally demand that both the UN and the FATF overhaul the global counter-terrorism framework to include enforceable human rights safeguards.
“It is about time that the Special Rapporteurs should call out the United Nations and the FATF to review the global strategy on terrorism and the FATF recommendations to provide safeguards to protect human rights, and provide sanctions for any violation,” he said.
Without such reforms, he warned, the pattern would repeat.
“Unless such safeguards are implemented and sanctions are imposed for violation of international human rights and international humanitarian laws, there will be other Frenchie Maes and Marielles.”
In a Facebook post, Carlos Conde, the former HRW researcher who worked on the group’s research on so-called “terror-tagging” in the Philippines, asked the UN experts if they “made representations with the FATF… whose ‘recommendations’ to governments such as the Philippines underpin the drive to prosecute more activists to satisfy the task force, no matter how flimsy or nonexistent the pieces of evidence are?” (Conde is the editor of Rights Report Philippines.)
The cases have drawn wider attention to the use of anti-terrorism and anti-money laundering laws in the Philippines to target journalists, lawyers, and activists — a practice human rights groups have labeled “red-tagging.” Critics say the government designates dissidents as communist sympathizers or terrorist affiliates, then uses counter-terrorism statutes to justify arrests and asset freezes.
The UN Special Rapporteurs have not yet responded publicly to the NUPL’s broader critique of the international framework’s role in enabling such practices. (Rights Report Philippines)