Photo: Carney meets with Marcos, Jr., October 2025.
On June 26, 2026, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that “the President of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., will visit Vancouver, British Columbia, from July 1 to 4, 2026.” That announcement highlights that the intention of this visit is to “identify further opportunities to deepen our economic and security partnership.”
The Manila Standard also reports: “President Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr. will make an official visit to Canada from July 1 to 4 as Manila and Ottawa seek to expand cooperation in trade, defense, and regional security. …The visit comes as Canada and the Philippines deepen ties across a range of sectors, including commerce, defense, energy, critical minerals, food security, tourism, and cultural exchanges.”
The announcement also comes just days after the release of a report by the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders that follows “a five-day fact-finding visit conducted from 2 to 6 March 2026 in Metro Manila [and] prior online consultation with Filipino human rights defenders in exile.”
The report “shows that repressive counter-terrorism laws and counter-insurgency policies have been used to attack and criminalise land and environmental rights defenders, human rights lawyers, journalists, trade unionists, and women human rights defenders, including those from Indigenous Peoples’ communities.”
It further highlights: “Threats, harassment (especially surveillance and ‘red-tagging’), arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial killings have been the most common forms of attacks against defenders.”
It also follows the release this month of the United Nations “Human Rights Count 2026” report that notes worldwide: “Since 2015, at least 5,995 defenders have been killed or disappeared worldwide. …Projected figures for 2025 indicate that at least 743 defenders were killed and 202 disappeared.”
In June 2020, the UN had reported that in the Philippines: “At least 208 human rights defenders, journalists and trade unionists, including 30 women, plus at least 40 legal professionals had been killed since 2015, many of whom were working on politically sensitive cases or advocating for land and environmental rights of farmers and indigenous peoples and housing rights of the urban poor.”
Most recently, Front Line Defenders reported that 4 human rights defenders had been killed in 2025 in the Philippines, while Global Witness documented that 8 land and environmental defenders had been killed in 2024.
In December 2024, Global Witness and the Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment (Kalikasan PNE) reported: “Since 2012, the Philippines has been ranked as the deadliest country in Asia for people protecting land and the environment, with mining linked to a third of all killings documented by Global Witness.”
They further highlighted: “The military has been linked to the highest number of documented killings and detentions of land and environmental defenders in the Philippines over the past decade. These abuses have gone unchecked.”
On June 18, 2026, at the time of the release of the report on the Philippines by the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, Shahindha Ismail, the Secretary-General of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) commented: “President Marcos Jr.’s failure to dismantle his predecessor’s apparatus of repression and to foster accountability for human rights violations means that human rights defenders are still not safe in the Philippines.”
We continue to follow this with concern.
Photo: BAYAN BC post on social media.
