SELDA: Free All Women Political Prisoners! Free All Political Prisoners!
KARAPATAN Public Information
PRESS STATEMENT
06 March 2026
SELDA: Free All Women Political Prisoners! Free All Political Prisoners!
On the occasion of Women’s Month, the Samahan ng mga Ex-Detainee Laban sa Detensyon at Aresto (SELDA), an organization of former political prisoners, calls for the immediate release of all political prisoners, including women political prisoners, in the Philippines.
Currently, 136 out of the 697 political prisoners held in various detention centers nationwide are women. They are behind bars because they dared to fight for human rights, environmental integrity and social justice. Many of them are community organizers, human rights defenders, development workers and grassroots leaders whose work for women’s rights and pro-people advocacies marked them for state repression. They are also mothers, daughters, sisters and wives cruelly wrenched from their families and the communities they served. Their imprisonment reflects a broader pattern of criminalizing dissent and suppressing legitimate political expression and action.
The detention of women raises urgent humanitarian concerns that are prevalent in a feudal and patriarchal society such as ours. Women in detention are particularly vulnerable to rape, sexual harassment, abuse and other forms of gender-based violence. Pregnant detainees and nursing mothers face additional hardships, forced to endure pregnancy and childbirth under difficult conditions, often with limited access to adequate reproductive and prenatal care, proper nutrition and a safe and enabling environment for their wellbeing. Detained mothers are separated from their infants, and young children confront emotional, physical and psychological hardships on top of the political repression they suffer. The death of Baby River, former political prisoner Reina Mae Nasino’s infant son, and the painful separation of Baby Randall Emmanuel from his detained mother Amanda Echanis at the age of three remain tragic reminders of the sufferings detained activist-mothers have had to endure. At the Correctional Institution for Women, Jean Publico, a Bicolana villager and mother of two who has been unjustly convicted of trumped-up charges of illegal possession of firearms, has not seen her children since her arrest and detention in 2022, due to hardships in raising the costs of their travel from the province.
Elderly women political prisoners are among the most seriously ailing detainees. Sixty-seven year old Cristina Garcia Miguel died of lung cancer at the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology Facility in Tuguegarao City in November 2023 after four years of detention. She was never granted access to appropriate medical treatment. Eighty-one year old Rosita Taboy, once the country’s oldest political prisoner before she was granted bail, suffers from breast cancer. Seventy-five year old Virginia Villamor suffered a stroke and temporarily lost consciousness in September 2024. She also suffers from severe vertigo and could not walk without assistance. Seventy-five year old Estelita Almanza, who was arrested in November 2021 in Sta. Maria, Bulacan, along with several others, on trumped-up charges of illegal possession of firearms and explosives, had long walked with a limp due to an old spinal injury, but her condition worsened in detention. Severe arthritis has swollen her knees and left her wheelchair-bound. She also contracted tuberculosis while in detention. Another woman political prisoner in her 60s, Miguela Peniero, survived cancer during her first incarceration from 2012 to 2020, but was rearrested in 2023 and continues to suffer from hypothyroidism, hypertension and a slipped disc.
Harsh conditions in detention compound the injustice faced by women political prisoners, many of whom are in jail on trumped-up criminal and anti-terrorism charges, enduring prolonged detention and delayed trials.
The rights to organize, to dissent and advocate for meaningful social change and women’s liberation are fundamental democratic rights that must never be suppressed. Women who have dedicated their lives to defending and organizing fellow women in impoverished communities and advancing human rights must not be punished for their convictions and their activism. The unjustness of their incarceration becomes especially stark when we consider that big-time plunderers responsible for stealing billions of pesos of public funds continue to roam free.
SELDA calls for the release of all women political prisoners and demands that their rights as activists, human rights defenders, development workers, environmental defenders and community organizers be upheld. Every day more that they spend behind bars is rank injustice.
Free all women political prisoners!
Freedom for all political prisoners!
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KARAPATAN is an alliance of human rights organizations and programs, human rights desks and committees of people’s organizations, and individual advocates committed to the defense and promotion of people’s rights and civil liberties. It monitors and documents cases of human rights violations, assists and defends victims and conducts education, training and campaign. It was established in 1995.