Presidential clemency ended the sentence Mary Jane Veloso was serving in the Philippines. It did not overturn the Indonesian drug conviction, and it did not end the separate prosecution of the people she says recruited and trafficked her.
When Veloso happily held up a copy of her absolute pardon at the Correctional Institution for Women (CIW) on Sept. 25, the document had an immediate effect: It opened the prison gate. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. had signed it a day earlier. Early on Sept. 26 she was out of prison after more than 16 years in detention, most of them spent on death row in Indonesia.
For Veloso and her family, that was the long-awaited fact. “Ito ’yung araw na pinakahihintay ko,” she said at a press conference later that day. But one week after the pardon, another fact needs to be kept just as clear: Freedom by presidential clemency is not the same thing as a court declaring that the conviction was wrong.
That distinction matters because Veloso’s story now runs on two legal tracks. One has ended: the enforcement in the Philippines of the sentence imposed on her in Indonesia. The other is still moving: the Philippine criminal case against recruiters Maria Cristina Sergio and Julius Lacanilao, whom she accuses of deceiving her into making the trip that ended with 2.6 kilograms of heroin being found in a suitcase she was carrying into Yogyakarta in April 2010.
What the pardon did
The 1987 Constitution gives the President the power to grant pardons after conviction by final judgment. Under the rules of the Board of Pardons and Parole cited by the Supreme Court, an absolute pardon means the total extinction of criminal liability without condition; it restores civil and political rights, and remits the penalty imposed for the offense.
But Philippine jurisprudence also draws a hard line between pardon and acquittal. In Monsanto v. Factoran, the Supreme Court rejected the sweeping idea that a full pardon simply makes a conviction disappear. A pardon may remove the punitive consequences of a conviction, but it does not erase the historical fact that the crime and conviction were judicially established. The high court called it “forgiveness and not forgetfulness.”
Veloso’s case is unusual because the judgment being enforced was not issued by a Philippine court. She was convicted in Indonesia in 2010. What allowed the Philippine government to assume responsibility for the continued enforcement of her sentence was the “practical arrangement” signed by Manila and Jakarta on Dec. 6, 2024.
Under that arrangement, Veloso was transferred to Philippine custody on Dec. 18, 2024. The Department of Justice said on Oct. 1 that the agreement provided that continued enforcement of her sentence in the Philippines would be governed by Philippine laws and procedures, including the authority to grant remission, amnesty, or other forms of clemency.
Indonesia, for its part, has publicly said it respects the pardon. Indonesian Coordinating Minister Yusril Ihza Mahendra said the arrangement preserved respect for Indonesian legal sovereignty while allowing the Philippines to enforce Veloso’s sentence under its own laws after the transfer.
The result is precise, even if the emotion surrounding the case is not. The pardon ended Veloso’s imprisonment in Philippine custody. It did not vacate the 2010 Indonesian judgment. It was not an Indonesian appellate decision, a retrial, or a judicial finding that the heroin was placed in her luggage without her knowledge.
The two governments’ own descriptions of the arrangement treat the Indonesian judgment and the Philippines’ authority over the continued execution of the sentence as separate matters.
That helps explain why Veloso, even after walking free, continues to speak about clearing her name. At the Department of Justice on Oct. 1, she again called on her former recruiters to say that she had no part in the drug trafficking that put her on death row.
“Siguro po ang mensahe ko lang sa kanila na sana ay manggaling po sa kanila mismo na wala akong kasalanan,” she said.
The pardon gave her liberty. It did not, by itself, produce a judicial finding of innocence.
The case that did not disappear
The Philippine case against Sergio and Lacanilao is therefore not a footnote to the pardon. It is the legal proceeding in which Veloso’s account of how she reached Indonesia is being tested against the prosecution’s evidence and the rights of the accused.
The Supreme Court’s own record lays out the prosecution’s theory. Veloso, Sergio and Lacanilao were friends and neighbors in Nueva Ecija.
According to the case record, Sergio and Lacanilao offered Veloso work as a domestic helper in Malaysia. Veloso raised money for the trip, but once in Malaysia she was told the job was no longer available.
Sergio then sent her to Indonesia, supposedly for a short holiday. Veloso alleged that Sergio gave her the luggage that she later used on the trip to Yogyakarta and that she did not know drugs were concealed inside it.
Philippine prosecutors charged Sergio and Lacanilao with qualified trafficking in persons under Republic Act No. 9208, illegal recruitment under the Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act, and estafa under the Revised Penal Code. They pleaded not guilty.
In 2015, with Veloso hours away from execution, the Philippine government told Indonesia that the alleged recruiters were already in custody and that her testimony was vital to their prosecution. Indonesia then granted her an indefinite reprieve.
That prosecution generated its own years of litigation. Because Veloso remained imprisoned in Indonesia, prosecutors sought to take her testimony there through deposition by written interrogatories.
In 2019, the Supreme Court allowed the exceptional procedure, saying her circumstances justified a flexible application of procedural rules while preserving Sergio and Lacanilao’s constitutional rights. The court reaffirmed its ruling in 2022.
By the time Veloso returned to the Philippines, however, she still had not personally testified in the cases. CoverStory reported in February that arrangements were being made for her testimony. A Mandaluyong court eventually ordered the CIW to provide a suitable room for the proceeding, and on June 19, 11 years after the cases were filed, Veloso finally took the witness stand inside the prison.
Read: More than a year later, no word from Marcos on ex-OFW Veloso’s renewed plea for clemency
One point is easy to muddle, and should not be muddled: Sergio and Lacanilao’s 2020 conviction for large-scale illegal recruitment is a different case involving three other victims. The charges arising from Veloso’s own allegations — qualified trafficking, illegal recruitment and estafa — have continued separately.
Veloso said on Oct. 1 that she intended to continue pursuing the cases. Whatever the trial court eventually finds will matter to the factual and legal record of how she was recruited and sent abroad.
But even a Philippine conviction of her alleged recruiters would not by itself overturn an Indonesian court judgment. They are separate criminal proceedings in separate jurisdictions. That is why “pardon,” “conviction of the recruiters” and “exoneration of Veloso” cannot be treated as interchangeable outcomes.
A trafficking principle tested across borders
There is another reason Veloso’s case remains larger than her release.
Section 17 of the Expanded Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act requires that trafficked persons be recognized as victims and says they should not be penalized for unlawful acts committed as a direct result of, or incident to, being trafficked, including acts done in obedience to a trafficker. On Oct. 1, Justice Undersecretary Nicholas Ty said the government had applied this “non-punishment principle” to Veloso.
On paper, the principle is straightforward. Across borders, it is not. Ty also acknowledged that another country does not automatically have to recognize a Filipino as a trafficking victim or apply the Philippine non-punishment rule. A Filipino arrested overseas enters another state’s criminal-justice system, with its own laws and procedures.
Veloso’s case is the brutal illustration of that gap. Philippine authorities could treat her as a trafficking victim, but that did not magically dissolve a foreign drug conviction. It took years of litigation and diplomacy, a bilateral prisoner-transfer arrangement, and, finally, executive clemency to get her back to the Philippines and out of prison.
The scale of Philippine labor migration makes that gap more than an exceptional legal puzzle. The Philippine Statistics Authority estimated 2.19 million overseas Filipino workers in 2024. Women made up 57.2% of them, and 68.4% of female OFWs worked in elementary occupations.
The government’s own anti-illegal-recruitment figures show that deception has hardly disappeared. As of February 2025, the Department of Migrant Workers reported closing 15 illegal recruitment hubs. Working with Meta and TikTok, it had also removed more than 98,000 online posts promoting deceptive overseas job offers. More than 40,000 aspiring workers and family members attended anti-trafficking and illegal-recruitment seminars in 2024.
The Commission on Human Rights, in its Sept. 29 statement on Veloso’s pardon, pointed to the same danger. It said migrant workers may fall prey to illegal recruitment, trafficking, exploitation and criminal syndicates, and said the vulnerability of women migrant workers may be compounded by poverty, limited access to legal help, gender discrimination and barriers in foreign justice systems.
Veloso’s freedom closes the part of the story measured in prison years. It does not close the legal story.
The unresolved question is no longer whether she will remain behind bars. It is whether the Philippine case against the people she says trafficked her will finally reach judgment, and what that judgment will establish after more than a decade of delay.
The broader lesson is harsher. A trafficking law is least useful when its protection arrives only after a worker has crossed a border, been arrested, convicted and forced to depend on diplomacy for survival. Veloso’s pardon was powerful enough to free her. It was never designed to rewrite the past.
The task left to the courts is different: to determine, on the evidence and with due process for all sides, who bears criminal responsibility for putting her on that path in the first place. CS
