When former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was arrested Tuesday and flown to the International Criminal Court at The Hague, his most prominent critic felt a glimmer of hope.
Maria Ressa, a journalist and co-founder of one of the Philippines’ top news outlets, came under constant attack for her work documenting the human rights abuses that soiled Mr. Duterte’s presidency. Activists estimate his bloody war on drugs killed as many as 30,000 people.
The International Criminal Court warrant accuses the former president of murder as a crime against humanity. Mr. Duterte, who finished his presidential term in 2022, is being held in detention at The Hague after a tense arrest in Manila, Philippines, last week.
Why We Wrote This
Journalist Maria Ressa reported on death squads that operated under former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. Now she sees hope – and accountability – as he faces charges of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court.
“It took almost a decade,” says Ms. Ressa, speaking to the Monitor on a video call. The arrest is a “reminder to the rest of the world that impunity ends, and accountability starts at some point. It will come for you sooner or later.”
At a time when facts have become a political battleground, she and her team have fought tirelessly to be able to tell the truth.
Making waves
Born in the Philippines and raised since age 10 in New Jersey, Ms. Ressa returned to her homeland on a Fulbright scholarship in the 1980s. She arrived shortly after the People Power Revolution, a series of protests that ousted former dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
Her career as a journalist began at local television stations. She made a name for herself as an investigative journalist and bureau chief for CNN in Manila and in Jakarta, Indonesia, and became an expert on Islamist terrorist groups in Southeast Asia.
In 2012, Ms. Ressa co-founded the online investigative news site Rappler, a portmanteau name combining “rap” and “ripple,” as in “making waves.” It was the first of its kind in the Philippines, and quickly became one of the country’s foremost news sites. She first interviewed Mr. Duterte, then mayor of Davao City, in 2015; he admitted to having killed three people, she recalls.
During the first year of Mr. Duterte’s presidency, she says, Rappler reporters would find about eight bodies in the streets every morning – mostly small-time drug dealers and users. Rappler was one of only a few news outlets to report consistently on these extrajudicial killings.
“Getting a few death threats now,” she wrote to a friend in the fall of 2016. That was just the start.
Dragged through the courts
Mr. Duterte called Rappler “fake news” and accused it of being owned by Americans and violating a requirement that mass media organizations be controlled by Filipino citizens. The site’s operating license was briefly revoked 2017.
In the following years, the government targeted Rappler and Ms. Ressa with nearly two dozen legal cases, including charges of tax evasion and a case of cyber libel for which she was convicted in 2020. She continues to fight the verdict; since Mr. Duterte left office, she has won eight legal cases against her and Rappler that his government had brought.
She also faced what Reporters Without Borders called an orchestrated hate campaign led by social media trolls allied with the government. Throughout, she remained steadfast in her commitment to getting stories out.
“I’m not an activist; I’m a journalist,” she says. “When it’s a battle for facts, then journalism is activism, because you anchor people in reality.”
Twenty journalists were killed during Mr. Duterte’s presidency, according to Reporters Without Borders. “Just because you’re a journalist you are not exempted from assassination,” the president had warned in his inauguration speech. The Philippines ranked 134th out of 180 countries in the 2024 World Press Freedom Index.
Ms. Ressa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, alongside Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov, in 2021, for her efforts to safeguard freedom of expression amid growing authoritarianism.
“You don’t really know who you are until you are tested,” she says. “I’ve gotten used to being Mr. Spock. You have to take your feelings and push them to the bottom of your stomach, because what is happening in the world today is not for the faint of heart.”
No regrets, says Duterte
Mr. Duterte has said that he offers “no apologies, no excuses” for the violent crackdown during his presidency. The police estimate that around 6,000 people were killed; human rights activists put the number as high as 30,000. On the way to The Hague, he posted a video on Facebook now viewed millions of times, saying, “I will be responsible for everything.”
Filipinos are divided over their former president, but a majority think that he should be prosecuted. A survey of 1,700 people earlier this month found that 3 in 5 approved of the International Criminal Court investigation.
The current president, Bongbong Marcos, has scaled back the war on drugs and promised less violence. Nonetheless, researchers at the University of the Philippines have counted over 900 drug-related killings since Mr. Marcos took office in 2022.
Journalists must be vigilant, Ms. Ressa says, because authoritarianism thrives in a world of disputed realities. She is a vocal critic of big technology platforms she says are designed for maximum profit at the expense of facts and truth.
Her work has convinced her of one thing, she says: “Democracy only functions in a world of trust.”
