Philippine Court Erases Final Duterte Bid to Crush Journalist Ressa
With former president now in jail, specious case disappears
The decision this week by the Philippine Solicitor General to recommend the acquittal of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa and former researcher Reynaldo Santos Jr. in a long-running cyberlibel case brought under the administration of former President Rodrigo R. Duterte brings to a close an ugly chapter in which officials sought to pervert the law to silence reporting contrary to the government’s version of reality.
At one point, the Duterte government had filed 23 legal cases against Ressa and her scrappy online news portal Rappler for cyber libel, tax evasion, violating foreign ownership restrictions and other alleged infractions. One of Time Magazine’s 2018 Persons of the Year and one of Asia’s most distinguished journalists, Ressa was repeatedly forced to post bail on a long string of charges widely perceived as harassment for Rappler’s refusal to buckle under and stop criticizing Duterte’s ill-starred drug campaign, which took thousands of lives.
The criminal cyber libel suit stemmed from a 2012 story by Santos which was filed in early 2019, seven years after the story originally ran and based on a law promulgated two years after original publication. Although Filipino businessman Wilfredo Keng brought the case, it was widely assumed to have been at Duterte’s behest. It went against Ressa and Santos at the trial and appellate levels, subjecting them to the possibility of seven years in prison before the solicitor general asked Monday that it be dropped.
The 80-year-old Duterte, now thwarted, was linked by human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to extrajudicial killings of hundreds of alleged criminals and street children by vigilante death squads. He was arrested on March 11, 2025, and transferred to The Hague to stand trial in the International Criminal Court…
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