Human rights group sends int’l observers for May 12 polls

Military and police personnel stand guard as transmission devices to be used in the May 12 elections are being delivered in Negros Island last April 7, 2025. Photo of Comelec-NIR)

MANILA, Philippines — International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP) has announced that it will send international observers to monitor the May 12, 2025 elections.

Dubbed as the “International Observers Mission 2025,” the ICHRP in a statement said that “it is more urgent than ever that independent observers collect, analyze, and project their findings to the international community.”

ICHRP noted that this will be done amid “ongoing reports of fraud, disinformation, and violence related to the electoral process— all against the backdrop of a consistently worsening human rights situation in the Philippines, marked by frequent disappearances, bombings of civilian communities in the countryside, and de facto martial law.”

The international human rights group launched an international observation in the 2022 elections where the observers concluded that the previous election was “not free and fair.”

ICHRP’s 2022 International Observers Mission was participated by 60 observers from over 11 countries.

The observers also documented “elections-related human rights violations including vote buying, failure of the vote-counting system, misinformation, red-tagging and threats, and even killings.”

2025 elections

Meanwhile, in line with the launch of the International Observers Mission 2025, ICHRP will also host a webinar titled “The World is Watching: Philippine Elections 2025” on April 23 (Philippine time) to explore the “imperative for independent observation in  the context of a profoundly corrupt electoral system.”

Poll watchdog Kontra Daya convenor Danilo Arao is expected to present the human rights situation in the Philippines, findings of the 2022 international observation mission, and preview of the 2025 mission.

The European Union will also deploy more than 200 observers for the upcoming May polls. According to its Deputy Chief Observer Manuel Sanchez de Nogues, the election observation mission will observe the accuracy, security, transparency of the voting, counting, and tabulation of the automated counting machines and campaign activities of candidates, among others.

The Commission on Elections also previously invited 25 election bodies to participate in its International Election Observation Program.