Introduction T his BOOk deals with the history of the Philippines and the Philippine security sectora. Specifically, it deals with the human rights challenge in the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) from a historical perspective, given its contemporary constitutional mandate as the “protector of the people”. 1 The discussion extends as far back as the 16th century, when Spanish conquistadores landed in the Philippine Islands, and ends on December 10, 1948, when after 5,000 years of civilization, nations banded together and agreed that all women and men are born with certain inalienable rights which have to be protected by the State and its instrumentalities. This commitment came in the form of a customary law known as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). This instrument provides a set of minimum standards on how States are to conduct themselves in relation to their citizens. This was later supplemented by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which were both adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1966. Part of the history of the Philippine military is connected and intertwined with European history. Filipino soldiers provided the bulk of the warm bodies of the Spanish Army in Southeast Asia (and later by the United States). They were used by the Spanish Army in the invasion of Formosa, Cambodia, Vietnam, Brunei and present-day Indonesia. They were also used as garrison troops in the cruel concentration camps in the Marianas and Caroline Islands where libertarians, Masons and high profile oppositionists to the Monarchy and clerical tyranny were sentenced to exile. During World War I, the American colonial administration prepared a full division of Filipino soldiers to fight in Europe, although this was overtaken by the armistice. From a world historical perspective, this was a period when the “Doctrine of Discovery” defined western foreign policy. The Doctrine of Discovery stems from three major Papal Bulls issued during Christianity’s Dark Ages. Despite its inhuman and barbarous origins, this doctrine remains valid in US Supreme Court jurisprudence (and is cited as part of the Laws of Nations or International Law). It is used by the governments of the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and other white colonies to deprive indigenous peoples of their claims over their ancestral domains. The gist of the Doctrine of Discovery is contained in the Papal Bull Dum Diversas which gave European Christian Kingdoms the vii