Maria RESSA
A journalist and writer, Maria Ressa has been the target of a campaign of judicial harassment and intimidation since her initial arrest on 13 February 2019. At the end of 2024, she remained free on post-conviction bail with two active cases against her remaining. These included Ressa and a colleague’s ongoing appeal to the Supreme Court against their 2020 conviction of cyber libel, that had been upheld on appeal in July 2022 and could carry a potential six-year sentence. The second case relates to a separate 2019 charge of violating the Philippines' Anti-Dummy Law, which places restrictions on foreign ownership or control of certain enterprises in the Philippines, in relation to foreign investment in 2015 in Rappler, a news outlet which she co-founded.
Five counts of tax evasion filed in 2018 against her and Rappler were dismissed in 2023, a significant victory for freedom of expression and the press in the Philippines (See Case List 2023/2024 for further details). Additionally, on 23 July 2024, the Philippines Court of Appeals overturned a 2018 shutdown order issued against Rappler which was instituted by the Securities and Exchange Commission in relation to the 2015 foreign investment in Rappler for which she is still facing Anti-Dummy Law charges.
Maria Ressa, born on 2 October 1963, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 in recognition of her efforts to ‘safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace’. Since 2018, she has faced numerous bogus charges for carrying out her journalistic work - work which includes ground-breaking journalism that exposes government corruption and the horrific human cost of former president Rodrigo Duterte's ‘war on drugs’, which has resulted in thousands of extra-judicial killings. She is the author of two books on the rise of terrorism in Southeast Asia: Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of Al-Qaeda's Newest Center (2011) and From Bin Laden to Facebook: 10 Days of Abduction, 10 Years of Terrorism (2013). She is the founder and CEO of Rappler, an online news platform.