José Maria Sison, born 8 February, 1939 in Cabugao, Ilocos Sur , is a writer, intellectual, and academic, and the founder of the Communist Party of the Philippines. A graduate of the University of the Philippines in 1959, he studied in Indonesia before returning to the Philippines to settle as a university professor. In the 1960's, he formed and chaired the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CCCPP), an organization with a Marxist-Leninist philosophy, pulling from his experience as a national youth leader and labor and agricultural reform activist. During that decade, the CCCPP organized the National People's Army (NPA) , the guerrilla-military wing of the Party, whose insurgencies around the Philippines, particularly in the northern part of the country, persist to this day. He went into exile in the Netherlands during the Ferdinand Marcos era.

After the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo joined United States President George W. Bush in using the event as a means of labeling Sison a terrorist, despite protests by high-level Filipino politicians, including the Vice President of the Philippines, who saw the move as politically cynical and one that undermined the democratic principles on which the Philippines is based on and Sison's own human rights. His asylum status went into question as a result of the move and placed him in jeopardy of not having a viable home.