A TALE OF TWO WOMEN
FRANCIS ‘KIKO’ PANGILINAN
It has been the worst of times for two Asian women lawyers who are currently languishing in jail for going against the powers-that-be. One is a former senator who valiantly criticized the drug war of a populist president. The other is a civil-society activist who brought attention to a myriad of human rights violations committed by an autocratic regime. One tried to change the system from within; the other one opted to stay outside. Both ended up behind bars for fghting for what is right.
They are Leila de Lima of the Philippines and Theary Seng of Cambodia. On 24 February this year, de Lima will mark her sixth year of detention. Seng meanwhile was sentenced to six-year imprisonment in June last year. Both faced charges that were clearly politically motivated.
De Lima, who is a former justice secretary and chairperson of her country’s human rights commission, was charged with three counts of conspiracy to engage in the drug trade. She was acquitted of one count in February 2021, while the other two remain on trial. In the course of the trial, several judges assigned to the cases recused themselves or opted for early retirement. In recent months, a number of key prosecution witnesses also recanted their statements against the former lawmaker, stating that they had been pressured by administration ofcials to execute those statements.
Seng, a U.S. citizen and survivor of Cambodia’s bloody Khmer Rouge era, was convicted of “conspiracy to commit treason” and “incitement to create gross chaos impacting public security.” The cases were in relation to the failed attempt of Sam Rainsy, acting leader of the defunct Cambodia National Rescue Party, to return to Cambodia in 2019. Seng was sentenced together with 60 other defendants for allegedly organizing the return of the self-exiled leader, an accusation that she has vehemently denied.
De Lima and Seng’s imprisonment on trumped-up charges refects how the political situation in both the Philippines and Cambodia has worsened in recent years. The Philippines’ ranking Freedom House’s Democracy
Index declined from 50th place in 2016 to 52nd place by end of 2022.
De Lima’s nemesis, Rodrigo Duterte was sworn into the Presidential ofce on 30 June 2016 and ended his term on 30 June 2022.
Cambodia’s decline is much more glaring, falling from 124th place in the Democracy Index in 2017, when the country last held its general elections, to 152nd spot out of 167 countries in 2022. It has practically been a one-party state in the last six years.
The drift to authoritarianism in both countries has been accompanied by the rise of corruption.
Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index shows that the Philippines slipped from 101st place in 2016 to 116th place in 2022. While Cambodia’s ranking improved from161st in 2017 to 150th in 2022, it remains to be the 2nd most corrupt
country in Southeast Asia, with only post-coup Myanmar ranking lower.
The Transparency International report also indicates that Cambodia’s judicial system remains to be one of the main sources of corruption in the country.
In the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index, which measures adherence to the rule of law through a comprehensive and multidimensional set of outcome indicators, Cambodia currently ranks 139th out of 140 countries, while the Philippines fares better at 97th place. The close-to-the-bottom ranking of Cambodia indicates that it scored low on most indicators, including constraints on governmental powers, respect for fundamental rights, and criminal and civil justice.
In the case of the Philippines, its lowest scores among the indicators were also on civil and criminal justice and fundamental rights.
when she investigated the latter’s extrajudicial killings when he was still serving as mayor of a major city in the Philippine South. Seng became a target of Hun Sen when she used both her international and local connections to draw attention to human rights abuses in Cambodia. The vague charges against both women, and the resulting trials, were clearly a sham. In the words of Seng, her trial was nothing but “political theatre… (where the) actors have to go by the script written by politicians.” The same can be said with regard to de Lima’s.
The cases against de Lima and Seng provide an illustration (and justifcation) of why the two countries scored relatively low in the Rule of Law Index. In both countries, the legal system has been used, and is continually being used, against government critics with the aim of harassing and intimidating them. Lawfare, defned as the “strategic use of legal proceedings to intimate and hinder an opponent,” has become the order of the day in both contexts.
Democracy, as they say, dies by a thousand cuts.
Lawfare, without a doubt, has been an integral part of this process.
In the hands of autocratic leaders like Rodrigo Duterte and Hun Sen, the courts and the law have been used as instruments of political vendetta. De Lima frst earned Duterte’s ire
Despite their current predicament, the two women have remained unbowed, unbent and unbroken. De Lima continued to perform her responsibilities as an elected senator remarkably well until the end of her term in 2022. She once said that she would rather be jailed in defense of what is right, than to go to hell in the company of those persecuting her.
Late last year, Seng launched a hunger strike to protest her prison conditions ahead of U.S. President Joe Biden’s visit to Cambodia. She also recently embarked on Khmer translation of the Bible while in jail. She had previously said that her detention can only limit her freedom of movement—but it can’t take away her freedom of conscience.
“We must remember that all power, no matter how seemingly absolute, is feeting,” said de Lima. “What is permanent is truth and justice.”
The best of times will come. Truth and justice will fnd de Lima and Seng. We hope, and—together with opposition allies—will pursue efforts, so that this happens sooner rather than later.
CALD Chairperson Francis ‘Kiko’ Pangilinan is also the chairperson of the Liberal Party of the Philippines