Flawed Evidence Cannot Justify Conviction: Free Frenchie Mae and Marielle

The Defend NGOs Alliance denounces the decision of the Tacloban City Regional Trial Court Branch 45 to affirm the conviction of journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio and church worker Marielle Domequil—not simply as a legal error, but as a dangerous consolidation of a system that punishes dissent even when the evidence collapses.

What is most alarming is not just the weakness of the case, but the willingness of the courts to sustain it anyway. By upholding a conviction built on dubious testimony and legally defective grounds, the ruling signals that in cases branded as “terrorism,’ the threshold for evidence can be lowered, the law can be bent, and due process can be hollowed out without consequence.

That is how repression deepens: not through dramatic crackdowns alone, but through decisions that normalize injustice in the language of legality.

The case against Frenchie Mae and Marielle was flawed from the start. The prosecution relied largely on the testimonies of so-called “rebel returnees,” who claimed that the two women delivered cash, ammunition, and supplies to an armed group. Yet these allegations were not supported by documentary, financial, nor physical evidence that could establish any concrete act of terrorist financing. At the same time, the defense’s evidence was dismissed for failing to establish their exact location at specific moments, effectively setting a higher bar for disproving the allegations than for proving them. What remains is a conviction sustained not by solid proof, but by unverified claims.

The charges were pursued within an anti-terror legal framework that has long been contested for enabling broad and vague interpretations of “support” to terrorism. Even after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Calleja vs. Executive Secretary raised serious constitutional concerns around aspects of this framework, cases like this continue to move forward, demonstrating how legal uncertainty is resolved in practice against the accused.

That choice matters. It tells journalists, church workers, and civil society actors that innocence is no longer a safeguard, that even baseless accusations can lead to years of detention and eventual conviction.

According to Altermidya, Frenchie Mae and Marielle are set to be transferred to the Correctional Institution for Women in Metro Manila, further distancing them from their families in Eastern Visayas. After more than six years of detention, this is not just continued imprisonment, it is the extension of punishment through displacement and isolation.

Their case shows how easily flawed charges can move through the system and still result in conviction, despite the lack of credible proof. When courts begin to uphold cases that should not have prospered, repression no longer hides behind impunity. It becomes policy, procedure, and precedent.

We recommend with urgency the following: (1) review the implementation of anti-terrorism laws towards amendment of repeal of these laws increasingly used to attack human rights defenders (HRDs), development workers, journalists, activists; (2) review and improve the Philippine justice system; (3) legislate the HRD Protection Act and a Comprehensive Anti-Discrimination Act; (4) disband the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) which is the state’s mechanism for red-tagging and vilification of activists, HRDs, development workers, trade unionists; (5) genuinely address the root causes of armed rebellion and pursue peace based on justice.#

Background photo credit: CARITAS