Ressa, after the sentence: “Today the facts win, the truth wins, justice wins”
Jan. 18 (EUROPA PRESS) –
Filipino journalist Maria Ressa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021, was acquitted by the Philippine court of tax appeals on Wednesday.
The court has also acquitted its news portal, Rappler, of four charges of tax evasion filed in 2018 during the previous term of Rodrigo Duterte.
This sentence ends more than four years of trial, two months after the Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission issued a closing order against Rappler on the basis of the accusation that it would have violated the law for allegedly being a foreign company. .
Ressa has declared, after the verdict, that “today the facts win, the truth wins, justice wins”, while he has called for the release of other colleagues.
Ressa’s lawyer, Francis Lim, has indicated that the legal team had “no doubt that this day would come”: “I told them to keep the faith, because in our hearts we knew an acquittal would come.”
“We trusted our judiciary, everyone knew where this case came from,” he assured, referring to the fact that they consider this case to be a pattern of harassment against the reporter’s work.
With the elimination of these tax evasion cases, there remain three active legal cases against the media outlet and the journalist, for defamation.
