“I had no doubt from the very beginning that I will be acquitted in all the cases the Duterte regime has fabricated against me based on the merits and strength of my innocence,” says Leila de Lima after a Philippines Court dismissed yet another Duterte-adduced case against her, because the witnesses said they lied.
“A heart of gold and a love of God has kept Leila De Lima in the fight against injustices in the Philippines, but under Rodrigo Duterte and Ferdinand Marcos she has been held in pre-trial detention for over six years, a gross violation of human rights. At least she wasn’t assassinated by death squads like thirty-five thousand other Filipinos in the past six years,” said Karinna Angeles, an avid supporter of former Senator Leila De Lima.
Leila De Lima has not been released from prison. She has one more of Duterte’s trumped up charges awaiting acquittal.
Office of Leila De Lima Photo
With tears rolling down their cheeks, Karinna Angeles, a humanitarian nurse with The RINJ Foundation hooked up with two women supporters of Senator De Lima whom Karinna had arranged to meet for tea to discuss this Friday development,
These women all endured the frustration of years pent up and released in a single moment near suppertime in Manila.
A Muntinlupa trial court on Friday, May 12, 2023, in Muntinlupa, Philippines had acquitted the former justice minister of one more trumped-up charge against her. The witnesses said they were made to lie.
This took six years to get cleaned in a totally failed democracy where America is walking all over Filipino Human Rights building its massive military bases to wage war on China. While Leila De Lima has been away, her country has gone too.
Philippines in bigger risk of war than we first thought
Published: Thu, 11 May 2023 22:34:27 Not since the Soviet Missiles went to Cuba in 1962 has the world been closer to a nuclear conflagration. This time, massive American military bases in the Philippines are targets as are the people of the Philippines.
Year after year, Leila De Lima has been named ‘Shero of the Year‘ for her human rights advocacy from detention.
2018 Shero Leila de Lima, Political Prisoner in the Philippines, Human Rights Defender, Senator & Professor. She is an extraordinary human rights defender.
Hardly a day goes by when Ms. de Lima is not in the news, challenging the murders in the Philippines. Leila Norma Eulalia Josefa Magistrado de Lima is a Filipino lawyer, human rights activist, senator and law professor. She is a known critic of the thousands of extrajudicial killings of mayors, clergymen, activists, homeless, poor, and drug users by the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte. In February 2017, days after garnering international awards for her campaign against extrajudicial killings in the Philippines, she was arrested. She has been imprisoned without bail since 02/2017. Her successor critic, a Senator Trillanes once dodged imprisonment on a similar attempt by the sitting President which failed.
Leila De Lima Global Shero 2022
“Not one day has passed when Leila De Lima has not acted in a humanitarian quest for peace and safety for her country folk,” said Karinna Angeles from Manila.
Held in prison by Rodrigo Duterte for many years, former senator Leila De Lima, a global Shero who has fought against the Philippines government’s continued extrajudicial killings first under Rodrigo Duterte and now under Ferdinand Marcos was today a hostage in an attempted escape by hardened criminals at Camp Crame.
On 8 October 2022 Senator (Retired) Leila De Lima was safe and undergoing medical attention following a violent hostage taking by Abu Sayyaf (ISIS) terrorists in Philippines Camp Crame detention center where she has been a political prisoner for 6 years. Prof. De Lima is a human rights activist in the Philippines jailed for her antagonism toward the ongoing extrajudicial killings conducted by the Philippines government of the Duterte-now-Marcos/Duterte Regime. In recent weeks, political opponents, human rights advocates and journalists have been killed in Duterte-style two-man-motorcycle-gunmen kill-team murders. Photo credit: Source Supplied
Senator Leila De Lima listens to a PNP-CIDG officer who served the warrant for her arrest at the Senate grounds in Pasay City Friday morning. 24 February 2017. Photo Credit Avito C. Dalan / PNA. Photo Art/Cropping/Enhancement: Rosa Yamamoto / Feminine-Perspective Magazine
“In the Philippines, rapists walk free while women who date their drivers are sent to the slammer. For years. That’s fair comment,” said a university professor in Manila who is familiar with the matter but not authorized to comment on behalf of her Philippines university and thus requested anonymity. She also said clearly, she does not want to be “killed by Duterte Death Squad members still roaming around killing people their bosses do not like”.
As a political prisoner of Rodrigo Duterte, against whom De Lima played the role of human rights defender—which displeased President Rodrigo Duterte completely—Professor Leila De Lima has been in jail since 24 February 2017.
On 2 August 2016, one month after Duterte took office and as extrajudicial killings began to mount in numbers, furiously, Dr. De Lima began her campaign with a privilege speech in the Philippines Senate.
“We have to continue opposing the murder of the innocents as well as that of the suspects. We must call for the accountability of state actors responsible for this terrifying trend in law enforcement, and the investigation of killings perpetrated by the vigilante assassins,” she said.
“In the campaign against criminality, we cannot applaud criminal methods merely because we are left unaffected. Life has more value than an accusation written on a piece of cardboard whether you are rich or a scum of the earth. Needless to say, all lives matter.”
In October 2016, De Lima had actually filed an Anti-Extrajudicial Killings Bill in the Philippines Senate which riled Rodrigo Duterte to no end. By that time the EJK death count was approaching 2,000 and because the DDS death squads were not up to snuff, there had been a lot of “collateral damage”—children murdered in the process of the killers trying to draw out the ‘targets’ who had gone into hiding. The killers did not get paid unless their target was proven to be dead, one such contracted killer told FPMag.
Pdf: Philippines Senate: An Act Defining Extrajudicial Killing, Providing For Its Penalty and Other Purposes. May not work on mobile AMP. Goto: NoAmp Version
Children in the Philippines are at high risk. Duterte calls murdered kids “collateral damage”. Photo courtesy The RINJ Foundation.
Rowena Vergara Tiamson, gone but not forgotten. Photo by Karina Angeles / RINJ.
On 16 March 2017, the European Parliament condemned the wave of extrajudicial killings in the Philippines and called for De Lima’s release. But she is still in the jail where recently she was kidnapped by ISIS terrorists.
On 1 February 2018, then-Senator Leila De Lima hit the Asian Correspondent‘s list of five prominent Southeast Asian leaders and human rights defenders who face weaponized justice department charges for defying the autocratic leaders of their countries.
This is what Leila De Lima has been fighting against since mid 2016 until now. This Shero’s supporters in the Philippines in their netzines are thanking her every day.
Witnesses brought against De Lima, were according to testimony, coached by some of the people on the list below. They have since recanted their original evidence which of course raises the question, if they are liars, which statement is the truth and which is a lie. De Lima should not be held in custody unless it is for purpose of protecting her from Duterte Death Squads. But she should have the option to find her own protection.
The names listed below are in fact the people named in written ICC complaints of extrajudicial killings in the Philippines accepted by the International Criminal Court (ICC). These men of the Duterte regime are facing with fear the potential of being indicted by the ICC. The Marcos/Duterte government is doing everything in its power to thwart the efforts of the ICC prosecutor, however with considerable success. The ICC is not known for its successes and better known for its lapses.
The allegation against De Lima is that in some point in Professor De Lima’s life, she was having a romantic acquaintance become her official driver. Because she was having an affair with this person who is alleged to have used drugs at some point, she was therefore herself a drug user and the male correspondent was some kind of bagman. None of this is capable of proof over some six years and the original witnesses have adduced that the alleged crime, be it a crime or not, did not happen.
Former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte
Former Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre
Former Philippine Police Director General Ronald Dela Rosa
House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez
Former Interior Secretary Ismael Sueno
Police Superintendent Edilberto Leonardo
Senior Police Officer 4 Sanson ‘Sonny’ Buenaventura
Police Superintendent Royina Garma
National Bureau of Investigation Director Dante Gierran
Solicitor General Jose Calida
Sen. Richard Gordon
Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano
The numbers of Extrajudicial Killings in the filing to the ICC were prepared by The RINJ Foundation in the Philippines officially in late 2018.
- Some 25 to 29.7 extra violent deaths occur daily in the Philippines as a result of state-personnel and state-directed-vigilante extra judicial killings.
- 1600 Filipinos die daily from all causes.
- 22.3-27 daily killings already take place as a result of murders and occasional armed conflicts.
- Under Rodrigo Duterte there have been 27,832 extrajudicial killings up to December of 2018.
- These numbers which are filed with the International Criminal Court were prepared over a period of more than a year with the help of hundreds of mortuary workers, coroners, and other medical officials RINJ works with regularly for other reasons. This infrastructure tabulated deaths and their causes well before the Duterte Regime and the successor regime realized and imposed restrictions on that element of Public Health.
What does Leila De Lima stand for? “For one thing, global feminists have selected her year after year since 2017 as a Shero for all of her time fighting for life; fighting for human rights even while in illegal detention as a political prisoner of the Philippines’ Duterte and Marcos regimes,” says Katie Alsop of RINJ Women, from Paris.
“Together, let us denounce the relentless political persecution of Sen. Leila and decry her unabated public vilification by Duterte,” says Dr. De Lima’s extremely loyal office staff.
Rest in peace, Shero Shireen Abu Akleh.
Godspeed to sheroes Tsai Ing-wen and Leila De Lima who has been through hell and survived.