It’s Payback for De Lima as She Prepares Raps vs Duterte Regime Officials

By Beting Laygo Dolor, Contributing Editor

There should be payback for the nearly seven years former senator Leila de Lima spent in prison on what turned out to be trumped up charges numerous legal experts say should not have been filed in the first place.

With this in mind, and after spending little more than a week to rest after her ordeal, the former lawmaker who also served as Justice secretary under the Aquino administration has decided to go after the Duterte regime officials whom she blames for depriving her of nearly seven years of her life.

De Lima initially said that she was willing to help the International Criminal Court build its case against former president Rodrigo Duterte. She also said she was bent on filing charges against the likes of former Justice secretaries Vitaliano Aguirre ll and Menardo Guevarra.

De Lima asked the Ombudsman to investigate the pair, whom she blames as being at the frontline in the filing of raps against her by using convicts as main witnesses.

Her initial complaint was initially dismissed by the Ombudsman, which tries cases involving government officials. But De Lima took her case to the Court of Appeals (CA), which was ordered to reverse its decision dismissing her complaints.

In a statement to media released at the start of this week, De Lima said: “With the reversal of the Ombudsman dismissal by the CA, I expect the Ombudsman to now conduct a full investigation of both Aguirre and Guevarra at the very least, (and) at the very least require Guevarra to answer the administrative aspect of the case and defend his role in propping up criminal convicts as state witnesses even if they are disqualified from being granted immunity under the law.”

Almost all the witnesses who had testified against De Lima have since recanted their claims, with some pointing to Aguirre as the mastermind behind the plot to imprison her on false charges.

Also last week, De Lima asked that the last few witnesses who have yet to recant their testimonies give their revised testimonies at a Manila court.

De Lima had as far back as 2019 challenged the Ombudsman’s dismissal of the various cases she had filed against Aguirre and Guevarra, whom she had accused of graft, gross neglect of duty, and grave misconduct.

The CA sided with the former senator by stating that there was no valid reason to deny the conduct of the investigation on the administrative filed by De Lima for the alleged illegal admission of 11 convicted felons to the Justice department’s witness protection program (WPP).

De Lima argued that the law does not allow individuals who have been convicted of crimes involving moral turpitude to be eligible for WPP.

The testimonies of the felons was used by the Duterte administration to file drug-related raps against De Lima, resulting in her arrest and detention for more than six years.

In all, the Duterte government filed three drug-related charges against De Lima, all of which were non-bailable.

The courts, however, found two of the cases to be so weak as to result in their dismissal and De Lima’s acquittal.

While she still faces one last case, Justice Sec. Crispin Remulla surmised that De Lima would also be exonerated, which was why the court allowed her to post bail earlier this November.

De Lima drew the ire of Rodrigo Duterte, with whom she started investigation for multiple cases while he was still Davao City mayor. In reprisal, Duterte launched not only the false cases against her but also deep dived into her personal life with a sex tape, which turned out to be fake.