MANILA: Philippine boxing world champion and congressman Manny Pacquiao has announced he will take up a new challenge by running for a Senate seat in national elections next year.

Meanwhile, human rights victims of late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos’s regime vowed Tuesday to ensure his crimes would not be forgotten, after his son announced a bid for the vice presidency.

Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jnr said Monday he would run as an independent in next year’s elections, widely seen as a stepping stone to an eventual presidential bid, but rights groups pledged ferocious campaigns against him.

“Bongbong Marcos’s vice presidential candidacy is a clarion call not only for the countless victims of martial law, but for all freedom-loving Filipinos to wage the strongest struggle against the resurrection of the Marcos type of rapacious and fascist rule,” said Bonifacio Ilagan, vice-chairman of Selda (Cell), an organization of former martial law prisoners.

Pacquiao, whose popularity transcends economic classes and makes him one of the most recognizable people in the Philippines, said late on Monday he was looking at one of the 12 Senate seats up for grabs in May.

“I am formally announcing my candidacy for senator. I am running for higher office,” he said during an address in his home province of Saranggani, which he represents in Congress.

“Maybe it’s time, this will be the first time in our history that we’ll have a senator from Region 12,” Pacquiao told his constituents, referring to one of six regions comprising the southernmost Mindanao islands.

Pacquiao, 36, did not say what party or coalition he would join for his Senate bid. Politics in the Philippines is a multi-party system that has long been dominated by powerful clans, as well as film celebrities and sports stars.

As a second-term congressman, Pacquiao authored 15 bills and co-authored 27 others, mostly promoting social welfare and sports-related causes.

However, the Philippine Daily Inquirer newspaper reported early this year that Pacquiao attended only four sessions of Congress in 2014, the fewest of any congressman.

The Marcos family has long been dogged by accusations the dictator oversaw massive human rights abuses and plundered billions of dollars from state coffers until a famous “people power” revolt toppled him from power in 1986.

But after the Marcos patriarch died in exile in Hawaii in 1989, the family returned to the country in 1991 and began a successful political comeback, culminating in Bongbong Marcos getting elected to the Senate in 2010.