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...
Tag: overseas Filipino workers
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Asking the difficult OFW question
While Vice President Sara Duterte is often criticized for her frequent trips abroad—her “world tour”—the specter of 2028 grows larger and the question of how to stop another Duterte presidency becomes harder to ask. What’s obvious is that Sara Duterte is securing the vote of the overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), a small but not insignificant...
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The mirage behind Asean’s vision of free labor flows
When the Asean Economic Community was officially launched in 2015, the rhetoric was intoxicating. A single market and production base. The free flow of skilled labor. A region where a Filipino engineer could compete on equal footing with a Singaporean counterpart, where a Filipino nurse could work in a hospital in Kuala Lumpur or Bangkok...