Jailed Philippine human rights campaigner Leila de Lima was “triumphant” yesterday after a judge granted her bail, putting her a step closer to freedom after nearly seven years behind bars.
De Lima, one of the most outspoken critics of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte and his deadly anti-drug war, was jailed on narcotics-related charges she says were fabricated to silence her.
The former senator, justice secretary and human rights commissioner waved to supporters as she exited the Muntinlupa City Regional Trial Court in Metro Manila, surrounded by police and journalists.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“This is a moment of triumphant joy and also thanksgiving,” De Lima said before boarding a minibus to be taken back to prison.
“I’ve been praying so hard for this day to come. It’s very painful to be jailed, despite being innocent,” she added.
Her lawyer, Filibon Tacardon, said De Lima “cried” when the decision was announced in the court.
“We expected the bail solely because of the merits of the case,” Tacardon told reporters.
“We believe that she’s innocent — we all believe that she’s innocent and all these charges are trumped up,” he said.
De Lima, 64, is accused of taking money from inmates inside the largest prison in the Philippines to allow them to sell drugs while she was justice secretary from 2010 to 2015.
Multiple witnesses, including prison gang bosses, died or recanted their testimonies, resulting in the dismissal of two of the three charges against De Lima.
She still faces life in prison if convicted on the remaining charge. In a decision dated Nov. 10, Judge Gener Gito allowed De Lima and her four surviving codefendants to post bail of 300,000 pesos (US$5,349) each.
It was not immediately clear when De Lima would walk free from the national police headquarters, where she has been held in a compound for high-profile detainees, rather than one of the country’s overcrowded prisons. Tacardon said he hoped it would be later yesterday.
Since Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr came into office in June last year, there have been renewed calls from human rights groups, foreign diplomats and politicians for De Lima’s release.
Rights groups welcomed the bail decision.
“She never should have been unjustly prosecuted and detained by former president Rodrigo Duterte,” Human Rights Watch deputy Asia director Bryony Lau said.
Lau said Duterte’s administration “concocted evidence and used the machinery of an abusive state to punish her for performing her duties as a senator and speaking out against the ‘war on drugs.’”
Amnesty International called for the last remaining drug charge to be “dismissed expeditiously” and those behind her detention “be brought to justice.”
Before her arrest on Feb. 24, 2017, De Lima had spent a decade investigating “death squad” killings allegedly orchestrated by Duterte during his time as Davao City mayor and in the early days of his presidency.
She conducted the probes while serving as the nation’s human rights commissioner, and then from 2010 to 2015 as justice secretary in former Philippine president Benigno Aquino III’s administration that preceded Duterte’s rule.
After winning a Senate seat in the 2016 elections that also swept Duterte to power, De Lima became one of the few opposition voices.
Duterte then accused her of running a drug trafficking ring with criminals when she was justice secretary, forcing her from the Senate and into a jail cell. De Lima lost her bid for re-election in May last year after campaigning from behind bars.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS