Retired Senior Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the Republic of the Philippines Antonio T. Carpio delivered the keynote address during SocDev 2021. Below is a transcript of his speech:

Pleasant day to everyone. Thank you for inviting me to address you this afternoon. 

We meet online today at the worst of times. We face daunting challenges we have never faced before in the last 75 years. The pandemic has debilitated our economy with at least 50% of SMEs having closed down. We have one of the longest lockdowns in the world, resulting in the steepest contraction of our GDP since 1945. More than 5 million are unemployed, exacerbating our already high unemployment rate. Some 60% of the people are experiencing hunger. Our hospitals are overwhelmed. The slow motion of vaccination will take years before we reach herd immunity. On top of this, we have to fight to preserve our civil liberties which are under constant assault by the Duterte administration. And there is China, relentlessly encroaching on our Exclusive Economic Zone in the West Philippine Sea. 

How do NGOs like you, or anyone with an advocacy for that matter, perform its mission under this extremely difficult environment? I can only speak from my own experience. My advocacy is defending our sovereign rights in the West Philippine Sea. The most important part of my advocacy is giving lectures all over the country and abroad, in colleges and universities, in social clubs, business, professional, and religious groups, all of which require appearing before an audience ranging from 100 to 500 people in a hall or auditorium. I would give my lectures once, or sometimes twice in a week at most. With a pandemic, this most important part of my advocacy was simply impossible to carry out. The pandemic meant in-person meetings in halls and auditoriums were banned. 

But I did not want to end, or even pause, my advocacy. What I did was to partner with an online education company to make a video of my lecture, a video lecture that is engaging, informative, full of pictures, graphics, and maps. The reason for this is that 90% of what we remember comes from images, whether pictures, illustrations, or maps. Only 10% from spoken or written words. That allowed my lecture to be long, 1 hour and 22 minutes, to include almost everything I want the public to know about the West Philippine Sea issue. 

I uploaded my video lecture on YouTube, hoping that at least for the same audience, at most 1,000 people per week that I had during my in-person lectures before the pandemic. To my pleasant surprise, I was getting 2,000 viewers per day, or 14,000 viewers per week. In short, I became 14x more productive during the pandemic than before the pandemic. My audience now is the entire world; it can be accessed any time of day or night where YouTube is available. Even when I sleep, my YouTube video lecture is working for me. I have less stress for I do not need to travel within the country or abroad. Whenever schools or civic groups invite me to give a talk, I ask them to watch my YouTube video lecture any time before the webinar. During the webinar, I simply give a short wrap-up and updates, and then proceed with the Question-and-Answer portion.  This is how, even during the pandemic, I accept invitations from all over the world to discuss the West Philippine Sea issue. 

I continue with my education campaign on the West Philippine Sea Issue because I believe that exposing the untarnished truth, the actual historical facts, will lead the people to accept the arbitral award that the Philippines won in the South China Sea arbitration. This is a battle for the hearts and minds of peoples of the world, and that battle starts and ends with the truth about the history of the South China Sea. 

I have narrated my personal experience on how I continue with my advocacy despite the pandemic, and even reach more people all over the world to show that the pandemic should not frustrate or defeat our advocacies. Of course, it is not only the pandemic that we have to battle with during this time. Our own President has been defending China, even as China has been relentlessly encroaching our Exclusive Economic Zone in the West Philippine Sea. We also have to fight and overturn the Anti-Terror Law, which will greatly curtail our civil liberties going forward. And we have to prepare for that day in May 2022 to bring back good governance to our country. Despite this pandemic, and even with these other issues, we can and we should carry on with greater zeal with our advocacies, knowing that what we are doing is just and right, all for the good and benefit of present and future generations of Filipinos. 

One day we shall overcome and resolve all of these issues, and we should meet again, in person, at the best of times. Thank you, and a good day to everyone!