The Philippines is jailing journalists in the name of “terror financing”: why the world should be alarmed

Frenchie Mae Cumpio, a 26-year-old journalist, has spent almost six years in jail. A court in the central Philippines port city of Tacloban recently convicted her of “financing terrorism” and sentenced her — alongside church worker Marielle Domequil — to 12- 18 years imprisonment. At the same time, they were acquitted of separate firearms and explosives charges that the government once touted so loudly, claiming they had found a gun and a grenade in a 2020 police and military raid on a boarding house that first landed Cumpio behind bars.

That means Cumpio has spent nearly six years in pre-trial detention. The process and the result offers a snapshot of how counterterrorism laws can be manipulated into political tools.

The Philippines does not have to invent terrorism to justify counterterrorism. There is a real communist insurgency. There are real extremist groups. There are real victims. The problem is that “terrorism” has become the state’s all-purpose solvent: it dissolves the presumption of innocence; it turns ordinary civic work into suspicious behavior; it makes solidarity itself look like complicity.

And because “terror financing” sounds technical — bank accounts, compliance, global standards — it can be even more effective. It comes with the aura of boring competence: spreadsheets, regulations, “best practice.” That aura matters, because it dulls the moral alarm bells. It turns an argument about rights and power into a question of “financial integrity.” It shifts the conversation from “What evidence?” to “Why are you defending suspects?”

This is why the Cumpio case cannot be treated as an isolated press freedom scandal. It should be read as a warning about how the language and machinery of countering terrorism financing can be repurposed – domestically, and in any country — as lawfare.