Charges against the 64-year-old former senator were dropped in the last of three pending court cases. De Lima has paid for her fight against distortions and abuses related to the former president’s “war on drugs.” Outside the courthouse, she was cheered by her supporters. She was falsely accused of having financed her candidacy for senator in 2016 with drug money.
Manila () – A Philippine court this morning, in the last of three pending cases, acquitted Leila de Lima, 64, probably the most critical and combative voice that tried to counter the bloody “war on drugs” of the former President Rodrigo Duterte. Indeed, the judges have issued a definitive dismissal in the drug and drug trafficking case against the former senator, as confirmed to the press by her lawyer Filibón Tacardón. This is just one of the many legal battles that the politician and activist has faced and won, who paid with years in prison for her fight for rights, freedoms and distortions linked to the campaign carried out by the former head of state against price of tens of thousands of deaths and extrajudicial executions.
The last of the various charges – for which she could also receive a life sentence – concerned having received money from inmates in the country’s largest prison to allow them to sell drugs, while she was Minister of Justice between 2010 and 2015. In October 2022 De Lima almost died at the hands of a detainee who held her hostage inside the detention center – considered maximum security – of the Philippine National Police. When she commented on what happened, Ella De Lima said that at the time she thought that she “wouldn’t make it out alive.”
The former senator was greeted by exultant supporters outside the court as the final touch to a judicial marathon that began in 2017 with numerous charges, just months after the Senate-ordered investigation into Duterte’s anti-drug campaign. Critics and human rights groups have reported that police summarily executed drug trafficking suspects, adding to thousands of deaths under mysterious circumstances, accusations that have been systematically denied by law enforcement, claiming they were acting in self-defense. The former president, whose term ended in 2022, is being investigated by the International Criminal Court.
De Lima served 6 years and 8 months of “preventive detention”, without concrete evidence, and was only released last November for health reasons. On that occasion he once again assured that he would continue fighting for justice. The former senator is, indeed, the perfect example of the way Rodrigo Duterte silenced his critics and his opposition. De Lima had harshly questioned the former president for his bloody war on drugs that in a few years killed almost 30,000 people, according to estimates by various human rights groups. Because of her fight for rights and against the violations of the Manila authorities at that time, she was accused of having allowed illegal drug trafficking in the New Bilibid prison during her term as Minister of Justice.
According to the accusation, De Lima would also have financed her candidacy for senator in 2016 with that money. Over the years she has always vigorously rejected the accusations, stating that they were politically motivated, and indeed when Duterte’s term ended, many people who had testified against her changed their version of events. The anti-drug campaign was later reconsidered when the current head of state, Ferdinand Marco Jr., son of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos, took office.
At the time she was arrested, the Philippine Church, highly critical of Duterte’s “war on drugs,” also intervened harshly to condemn the senator’s arrest. In an interview with In March 2017, the then auxiliary bishop of Manila, Msgr. Broderick S. Pabillo spoke of “political revenge” because “he had provoked Duterte’s wrath with his investigations. They want to make him pay.” “I am convinced – added the prelate – that the Church must make itself heard, not so much as a critical voice of the president’s death policies, but rather to educate people to reject the idea that killing is the solution for our issues”.
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