Court Reverses Order to Shut Down Award-Winning Philippine News Site Which Challenged Last President

President Rodrigo Duterte took office in June 2016 after campaigning with a pledge to do something drastic about the rising wave of illegal drug manufacturing and distribution in the nation. He promised that something would include doing “whatever it takes”, utilizing his presumed authority as head of state to target potential drug traffickers and “take them out” by whatever means he deemed necessary.

He moved quickly on that promise. He reorganized the national police force into a cadre of militant thugs who were given the firepower and access to often spurious information linking individuals to unlawful drug use and distribution. He authorized them to use that information in ways which even now, over 8 years after he set up his government-backed assault teams, continues to carve horrific memories the minds of everyday Filipinos.

Based sometimes on the thinnest of evidence, in the most extreme cases Duterte’s national police teams would arrive without warning at homes or other dwellings where they suspected drug traffickers to be living or hiding. They would force their way in without warning. Often without even attempting to arrest those they found, secure evidence of the crimes they were alleged to have committed, or even considering bringing those they found to trial, the police would enter the buildings by force, guns blazing.

For those who were in fact captured and charged with illegal drug making or distribution, many were murdered in their cells long before they could ever come to trial. Sometimes they died at the hands of national police who claimed they were subduing a potential prison break or other provocation. Sometimes the deaths were never explained at all.

Duterte praised the police who killed their drug trafficker targets in their homes before there was even a chance at a legal trial, and those shot while in custody, as having protected the country from those alleged traffickers while also saving the country a great deal of money by avoiding a trial. For those police who were later charged with various crimes related to the break-ins they made to hunt down drug criminals, Duterte promised pardons in advance, so they would continue to operate beyond the boundaries of the law in – by Duterte’s observations – ridding the country of human pests who were a broad danger to society.

The official Philippine death count from Duterte’s “extrajudicial killings”, while he served as the president of the Philippines from 2016 to June 2022, was 6,229. Based on widely available independent tallies ranging from multiple human rights groups, and ongoing coverage of the many drug-related deaths such as in the Manila-based Philippine Daily Inquirer Newspaper, which maintained an ongoing “Daily Kill List”, the real number of those unlawfully murdered by Duterte’s personal militia is believed to be as high as 20,000.

While newspapers covered the carnage Duterte had caused in the country, there was throughout most of this period only one news source in the Philippines which openly confronted and challenged President Duterte for his unlawful actions while president. That news source was Rappler.

Rappler was founded by Maria Ressa in January 2012. To get started, it received initial funding from the Omidyar Network, the philanthropic arm of EBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Since under Philippine law local media companies of any kind are not allowed to be owned either in whole or in part by foreign enterprises, some years after Rappler was already fully operational and sufficiently profitable that it no longer needed access to the original seed money, Omidyar released the investment to the company’s staff.

Ressa, an experienced journalist and fearless advocate for human rights for most of her career, used the Rappler platform to question openly the savagery and illegal nature of Duterte’s police state. It did so based on intensive behind-the-scenes investigations involving thousands of information sources, and via on-screen interviews with those willing to speak up about what happened.

Rappler attracted a wide audience for its open questioning of Duterte’s acts. It also attracted multiple criminal sanctions from the Philippine Justice Department, acting at the direct guidance of Rodrigo Duterte himself.

The charges against Rappler, its head Maria Ressa, and other senior members of its staff included everything from being a partially foreign-owned enterprise (which it was only briefly, and long before the heavy reporting against Duterte began), multiple unfounded tax evasion charges, and cyberlibel. The latter charges are a uniquely Filipino type of criminal act, which includes being subject to sanctions, massive fines, and even jail time for reporting acts which are factually correct but somehow harm those who they expose for their own illegal acts.

There was even a charge against Rappler for having corrected an error on their website which even the government acknowledges was a typo, under the cyberlibel law which was not even in effect when the original version of the website was posted. The government charged Ressa and others on the grounds that the mistake in an old article on the website, which even those in the government acknowledged was a minor error, had remained publicly available past the time the new law was passed.

For her actions in continuing questioning everything connected with Duterte’s extrajudicial killings, Maria Ressa was charged with multiple crimes which could have put her in jail for over a decade.

In 2018 the government’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ordered Rappler’s license to publish revoked. The grounds were that it had been funded by Omdiyar’s nonprofit, even though the money was later redistributed elsewhere. Rappler and Ressa appealed the decision through multiple courts, It was officially reaffirmed on June 28, 2022, just two days before the end of Duterte’s term.

Ressa and her staff appealed that decision shortly afterwards. It also was allowed to continue to operate during the appeals process.

On July 23, in a ruling decided by the Philippine Court of Appeals but only just released yesterday, the SEC decision – and multiple higher court decision which supported it – to revoke Rappler’s “certificate of incorporation” was overturned.

In its decision, the Court of Appeals declared that the SEC’s original action represented a “grave abuse of discretion” on behalf of the agency. It said taken the action then was in direct contradiction of “established procedures, jurisprudential and legal instructions, and clear intent of the Constitution.”

For her courageous acts to stand up to Duterte’s criminal actions, Maria Ressa was awarded one of two Nobel Peace Prizes in 2021.

In its announcement about this achievement, the Nobel Committee issued the following statement about Ressa:

“As an investigative journalist, she has distinguished herself as a fearless defender of freedom of expression and has exposed the abuse of power, use of violence and increasing authoritarianism of the regime of President Rodrigo Duterte. In particular, Ms Ressa has focused critical attention on President Duterte’s controversial, murderous anti-drug campaign. She and Rappler have also documented how social media are being used to spread fake news, harass opponents and manipulate public discourse.”

In commenting about the court decision revealed yesterday, Human Rights Watch’s Carlos Conde commended the ruling as “long overdue”.

“The Court of Appeals decision to void the SEC’s shutdown order against Rappler is long overdue,” he said in a statement to the press. “That order should never have been handed down by the Duterte administration, whose vindictiveness knew no bounds.”

In a statement released by Rappler yesterday, it declared the ruling was “a vindication after a tortuous eight years of harassment.”

“We are a Filipino company,” she said. “We are independent.”

Despite this win, and despite having already won cases dismissing the many tax evasion charges and most other crimes, Ressa and one of her co-founders are still fighting the cyberlibel charge. Ressa is also still in litigation over a separate charge involving accepting the original Omidiyar investment. On the second case, the charge could put her in jail for over seven years if she is convicted.

During a press briefing yesterday, Ressa attempted to take the current win as a sign of things going the best way they could for her and her company.

“Obviously I don’t want to go to jail,” she said when asked specifically about the cyberlibel charges which are still hanging over her. “But I’m not going to let it stop me from doing my job.”