Extra judicial killing are killing performed by people under the auspices of the government, usually for political reasons (such as disposing of dissidents or establishing social control through state terrorism), but without the normal, established judicial processes of capital punishment.

In other words, whenever a person is effectively tried, convicted and executed outside of a court of law, it is an extra-judicial killing. This applies to South American death squads, KKK lynch mobs, shootings by private citizens in ‘Castle Defense’ states, shootings of unarmed black men by US police, and any other case where a single individual or group determines that another person is guilty of a crime and carries out what amounts to capital punishment on his own initiative.

Extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances in the Philippines are illegal executions – unlawful or felonious killings – and forced disappearances in the Philippines. These are forms of extrajudicial punishment, and include extrajudicial executions, summary executions, arbitrary arrest and detentions, and failed prosecutions due to political activities of leading political, trade union members, dissident and/or social figures, left-wing political parties, non-governmental organizations, political journalists, outspoken clergy, anti-mining activists, agricultural reform activists, members of organizations that are allied or legal fronts of the communist movement like "Bayan group" or suspected supporters of the NPA and its political wing, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP).

Extrajudicial killings are most commonly referred to as "salvaging" in Philippine English. The word is believed to be a direct Anglicization of Tagalog salbahe ("cruel", "barbaric"), from Spanish salvaje ("wild", "savage").

Extrajudicial killings (EJKs) is also synonymous with the term "extralegal killings" (ELKs). Extrajudicial/ extralegal killings (EJKs/ ELKs) and enforced disappearances (EDs) are unique in the Philippines in as much as it is publicly and commonly known to be committed also by non-state armed groups (NAGs) such as the New Peoples Army (NPA) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). Though cases have been well documented with conservative estimates of EJKs/ ELKs and EDs committed by the NPAs numbering to about 900-1,000 victims based on the discovery of numerous mass grave sites all over country, legal mechanisms for accountability of non-state actors have been weak if not wholly non-existent.

Philippine extrajudicial killings are politically motivated murders committed by government officers, punished by local and international law or convention. They include assassinations; deaths due to strafing or indiscriminate firing; massacre; summary execution is done if the victim becomes passive before the moment of death (i.e., abduction leading to death); assassination means forthwith or instant killing while massacre is akin to genocide or mass extermination; thus, killings occurred in many regions or places throughout the Philippines in different times - 136 killings in Southern Tagalog region were recorded by human rights group Karapatan from 2001 to May 19, 2006.