(Eagle News) — Senator Leila de Lima has cried foul over some people’s comments her detention was a result of the existing political climate, saying this implied she targeted political enemies when she was in a “better” political climate in the first place.
“I have persecuted no one for political reasons or personal vengeance. I have killed no one. I have stolen nothing. I have sold or traded no drugs. I have not conspired with anyone to engage in any criminal activity,” she said in a statement sent from Camp Crame, where she is detained on illegal drug charges.
The charges stem from her alleged involvement in the proliferation of the illegal drug trade in the New Bilibid Prison when she was justice secretary.
According to De Lima, “even when the political winds blew in her favor, especially during her stint as Chair of the Commission on Human Rights and as Secretary of the Department of Justice,” she “valued truth, justice and the rule of law more than anything.”
“I suborned no false testimonies, I fabricated no evidence, I invented no false and baseless charges – as proved by the fact that the Office of the Ombudsman filed cases after its own investigation, and the decision of the Sandiganbayan in a recent case of acquittal was far from unanimous,” she said.
For De Lima, she was under “unjust detention” because of the “personal vendetta against her of the powerful enemies she has made while performing her mandate without fear or favor in her years of public service.”
She said, without naming names, that these “powerful and influential personalities” include “a former President, a Senate President, senators, congressmen, local government chief executives … and now even an incumbent President.”
“What really irks me is when people – most of them well-meaning, but unintentionally infuriating – attempt to summarize my unjust detention and political persecution as a consequence of the political climate. ‘Weather-weather lang yan, Leila.’ It infuriates and hurts me – this unfair oversimplification of what I am going through,” De Lima said.
