Assistant Professor, University of the Philippines College of Law

He is an Assistant Professor at the University of the Philippines and also, at the same time, a human rights lawyer and advocate for many human rights issues with the Free Legal Assistance Group (FLAG), the oldest human rights lawyers’ network in the country, which he joined after he passed the bar in 1991, and where he is currently the regional coordinator for Metro Manila.

In the area of human rights, he has litigated, and continues to litigate, cases at all levels of the court system. He has presented oral arguments to the Philippine Court of Appeals as well as to the Philippine Supreme Court on many occasions, involving issues such as the constitutionality of the death penalty in the Philippines and the Anti-Terrorism Law of 2020. He has represented journalists in libel and cyberlibel suits and continues to do so. He has also given, and continues to give, training to journalists to equip them against nuisance defamation suits as well as to NGOs and advocates against red- and terror-tagging. He has filed communications before international human rights bodies in representation of death row convicts, spoken in international and domestic forums regarding abolition of capital punishment. Among his chief advocacies are the abolition of capital punishment, freedom of expression and freedom of the press, the protection of civil and political rights, and abolition of criminal libel laws. He has served as consultant on tobacco control campaigns including legislation on packaging and branding as well as smoke-free environments. At present, he is consultant of a movement advocating against plastic pollution and sits on an experts panel for the implementation of the liability provision (Art. 19) of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC).

As a legal academic, he has taught a broad range of subjects in almost three decades of academic life, including criminal law, civil and criminal procedure, evidence, special proceedings, special human rights writs (amparo, habeas data, and habeas corpus), labor law, and has pioneered electives on law and medicine (co-taught with Dr. Raquel Del-Rosario-Fortun of the UP College of Medicine), martial law jurisprudence (co-taught with Prof. Gwen G. De Vera), and international criminal law and the law on transnational crimes (on the Masters’ level). He has been bar examiner three times—for criminal law (2014), labor law (2015), and procedure (2021/22). At present, he heads the UP Law Clinical Legal Education Program (CLEP) and is concurrently the Director of the UP Office of Legal Aid and the clinic head of the Civil and Political Rights Clinic. He also teaches at the Ateneo Law School and has taught at the De La Salle University Tañada-Diokno School of Law. He is also Chair of the Humanitarian and Human Rights Law Department of the Philippine Judicial Academy (PHILJA) and is a member of its Academic Council and its Curriculum Review Committee. He sits on three technical working groups created by the Supreme Court for the review and revisions of the Rules of Court.

From 2013 to 2018, he was the Chief Public Information Officer of the Supreme Court of the Philippines, acting as its de facto communicator to the media and to the public.

He has written and lectured extensively on many aspects of human rights protection and defense and is a regular resource person for media on many issues of the day. He is also an active podcaster and an occasional columnist with an active social media presence on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.