On 21 September 2026, the country marks the 54th anniversary of Presidential Proclamation 1081 – the day Ferdinand E. Marcos Sr. placed the Philippines under martial law and began fourteen years of a regime remembered for plunder as much as for repression. Twelve days earlier, on 09 September, court documents that the Supreme Court had quietly dismissed the last graft case against former First Lady Imelda Marcos, months before anyone outside the court knew. The case involved roughly US$ 200 million allegedly funneled through Swiss foundations during her time as Metro Manila governor, and had produced a 2018 conviction she never served. After nearly four decades, it ended not with an acquittal on the facts, but with a ruling that the decades-old Swiss documents had not been properly authenticated.
Marcos Jr. said he was glad the case was over, and went out of his way to reject any link between the ruling and his upcoming choice of the next Chief Justice. That he felt the need to say so is itself worth noting.
A Pattern, Not a Coincidence
The Imelda ruling is not isolated. It is the third major legal setback for accountability efforts against the Marcos family within eight months. In February 2026, the House dismissed impeachment complaints against Marcos Jr. alleging betrayal of public trust, graft, and constitutional violations, voting 284-8-4 and granting him a year of impeachment immunity. In June 2026, the Sandiganbayan terminated the remaining claims in Civil Case No. 0141 – the last active piece of a forfeiture case to recover Marcos family assets, not because the court found the family innocent. It is because the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG), the agency created in 1986 to recover Marcos wealth, told the court it would stop presenting evidence.
Three separate proceedings. Three separate institutions: Congress, the Sandiganbayan, the Supreme Court. Three dismissals. Watchdog groups have already call this an aggressive whitewashing of the family’s history.
Noise as Cover
None of this happened in a quiet news environment. It happened while the country’s attention was consumed by the largest corruption scandal in its history: a flood-control fraud scheme estimated to have cost the government somewhere between ₱42 billion and ₱545 billion in ghost and substandard infrastructure projects. That scandal produced televised Senate hearings, the arrest of a former congressman in Prague, and a genuine unresolved question of how far up the chain of command the rot goes.
Outrage is finite, and a government under siege on one front has every incentive to let other exposures resolve quietly elsewhere. But the clustering, three dismissals in eight months, each landing amidst flood-control corruption, is a documented fact, not speculation.
How the Cases Actually Die
A common thread runs through all three: none were lost on the merits. The forfeiture case ended because the state’s own recovery agency stopped presenting evidence. The Imelda graft case ended on technicality: decades-old foreign documents ruled improperly authenticated, not proven false. The impeachment complaints were dismissed as insufficiently substantive by a legislative majority allied with the president they targeted. In each case, the institution meant to pursue accountability was the one that closed the door on it.
One Law, Two Evidentiary Standards
The most telling part of this story isn’t the dismissals themselves; it’s what counts as evidence, and for whom.
Since the Philippines came under Financial Action Task Force (FATF) monitoring being put in the “grey list” category, the government built its exit strategy substantially on more aggressive Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) and Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) enforcement. That produced results to show at FATF plenaries, but also a pattern of NGOs and activists having their bank accounts frozen and facing terrorism-financing charges years before any court weighed in on the evidence. A 2021 Reuters investigation found that the FATF itself, a G7-created body still dominated by the world’s wealthiest economies, has supplied authoritarian-leaning governments from Uganda to India with cover to target critics under the banner of anti-terrorism compliance. The Philippines fits the same pattern: architecture built by and for the world’s largest economies, adopted as domestic law, then pointed at the government’s own critics.
Journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio and church worker Marielle Domequil illustrate this starkly. Arrested in 2020 under a non-bailable warrant for illegal possession of firearms and explosives, they were also found with roughly ₱557,000.00. Cumpio and Domequil said the money had been raised for humanitarian and journalism work. But the arresting officers nevertheless seized the money despite falling outside the warrant’s scope. The AMLC froze the funds, the prosecutors later added a terrorism-financing charge over that same money. In October 2025, the Court of Appeals nullified the related civil forfeiture order, finding no evidence linking them to any terrorist organization. Yet in January 2026, after six years of pretrial detention, a Tacloban court still convicted them of financing terrorism, sentencing them to 12 to 18 years, while acquitting them of the firearms charge that had justified their arrest. A court finding no evidence of terrorism in one proceeding did not spare them a conviction in another.
Set that against Imelda Marcos: four decades, and her case ends not because a court found the money clean, but because proof that it wasn’t was ruled improperly authenticated. For journalists and NGO workers, insufficient evidence still meant years of detention and conviction. For the family that once ran the country, it means the case disappears.
The Government’s Defense: Why It Doesn’t Hold Up
Marcos allies have a ready explanation. Cases this old, they argue, are hard to prosecute: witnesses die, documentation, and evidentiary standards adequate in 1990 may not survive scrutiny in 2026, with any failure blamed on decades of state neglect rather than anything the current administration.
That defense would be more persuasive if the timing were random. It is not. These dismissals have clustered specifically since Marcos Jr took office, delivered by institutions his administration directly influences: a House he commands a supermajority in, a prosecutorial body under his executive branch, and a judiciary whose next Chief Justice he is about to select. Decades of neglect explain why these cases were slow. They do not explain why they are all ending now, under this particular administration.
Why It Matters Beyond the Marcoses
The stakes here extend past one family. When forty-year-old accountability cases collapse on procedural grounds rather than merits, the message to every future official is clear: outlast the process, and it will let you go. The Marcoses did not invent this weakness, but they are exploiting it now, with full knowledge of what they are doing, making them its most immediate beneficiaries. The pattern they are entrenching will outlive this presidency unless it is named clearly while it is happening.
What Should Come Next
None of these dismissals can be un-ruled by outrage alone. But they can be documented, tracked, and kept in public memory rather than allowed to disappear into the same noise that provided their cover. That is the minimum the moment demands: a public record that does not let convenient timing pass as coincidence, and a civil society willing to keep asking the question the government would clearly prefer went away. Fifty-four years ago, Proclamation 1081 declared, in effect, that the law was whatever the Marcoses and their cronies needed it to be. That is not a metaphor for what is happening now; it is the plain throughline. A dictatorship that jailed 70,000 people and plundered billions has given way to a family that no longer needs tanks in the streets, because it has learned to let paperwork expire, evidence go unpresented, and institutions it controls decline to act. Filipinos do not need to imagine what unaccountable power looks like; they are watching it happen again, dressed up as due process. The only honest question left is whether the country will name that plainly while it is still happening, or wait to mourn it in hindsight the way it mourned martial law. #
Photo credit: Copyright 2022 The Associated Press/Aaron Favila. All rights reserved.