The company we keep
The company we keep
The campaign to decriminalize libel has been going on for three decades — since the 1986 “People Power” military-civilian mutiny put an end to the Marcos Sr. dictatorship. It is no exaggeration to say that that campaign has been a dismal failure despite the unflagging efforts of journalists’, media advocacy, and human rights defenders’ groups. Under the libel provisions of the 1932 Revised Penal Code (RPC) and the 2012 Cyber Crime Prevention Act, journalists can still be imprisoned if convicted of libel in the Philippines, just as, in certain other countries, they can also be jailed for this or that alleged offense.
Any attempt to correct that anomaly was bound to fail during the media-baiting Duterte regime. But in the last six months of 2022, at the onset of the Marcos II administration and as the year was ending, two bills, one in the House of Representatives and another in the Senate, were filed to decriminalize libel, the laws on which have penalized those convicted of it with imprisonment
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