President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has granted an absolute pardon to Mary Jane Veloso, completing a dramatic, 15-year legal ordeal that saw her narrowly escape execution by firing squad in Indonesia after being convicted of drug trafficking.
Marcos announced the decision Friday during an official visit to the Eastern Visayas region, confirming he had formally signed the executive clemency order the previous day. The move follows a Malacañang statement earlier in the week indicating that the president was weighing an absolute pardon on humanitarian grounds after an evaluation by his office earlier this year.
Veloso’s high-profile saga began in 2010 when Indonesian authorities arrested her at the Yogyakarta airport and discovered 2.6 kilograms of heroin hidden inside her suitcase. Convicted of drug trafficking that same year, she was sentenced to death under Indonesia’s stringent narcotics laws.
Throughout her imprisonment, Veloso maintained that she was an innocent victim of human trafficking who was duped by recruiters into transporting the luggage without knowing drugs were concealed inside. Her case became a rallying cry across the Philippines and drew international attention from migrant-worker advocates and human-rights organizations.
In 2015, Indonesian authorities spared Veloso at the eleventh hour just as other foreign death row inmates faced the firing squad, responding to urgent appeals from Manila to preserve her life so she could provide testimony against her recruiters in ongoing trafficking proceedings in the Philippines.
Veloso spent nearly 15 years detained in Indonesia before being repatriated to Manila in December 2024 under bilateral prisoner-transfer arrangements. Upon her return, authorities transferred her to the Correctional Institution for Women in Mandaluyong City to serve the remainder of her legal sentence under Philippine jurisdiction, setting the stage for Friday’s grant of presidential clemency.
