Lesson from prison: How political persecution keeps democracy alive 

It had begun with verbal attacks from the president, who vowed to destroy me publicly because I represented the human rights movement he said had made him a whipping boy. His men quickly added their own kicks and punches. I was “slut-shamed”:  videos and photos were doctored, false testimonies were collected. A Senate colleague described me as the “most wiretapped person in the country” – the president himself admitted he was listening in to my conversations with the help of a “friendly nation”.
It became a game of who could earn brownie points by brutalising the irrepressible Leila M De Lima.
For a while, I was referred to as “an unnamed female government official”. But anyone who knew me or Duterte, or knew about the spate of extrajudicial killings (EJKs) that began as early as the first two months of his presidency under his so-called “war on drugs”, knew that he was referring to me. After all, I had delivered a speech before the Philippine Senate calling for a stop to the killings.  
While I publicly supported the campaign against illegal drugs, I objected to the use of extrajudicial killings as a solution, for it embodies an evil far greater than what we were fighting. “Impunity, once unleashed, has no boundaries. It does not care who dies. It does not care who suffers. … [It] has no sense of right or wrong. It is as amoral as it is immoral. We need not destroy lives in order to destroy drugs,” I said.  
And with that, I signed my own arrest warrant.
The enemies I made – as chairperson of the Commission on Human Rights, as Justice Secretary and now as senator – were powerful and had demonstrated their brutality even before I became a public servant. 
Yet, short of killing me, my enemies have already done their worst. 
I thank them for making that mistake. It placed me somewhere I could not have reached without their help.
I am no longer just one woman. I’m now a prisoner of conscience.  
My persecutors thought that putting me in jail would isolate me until I withered into oblivion. But in my 10 years of public service, this has been the most liberating and engaging experience so far.  
Previously I was well-versed in the problems I was trying to draw attention to. But there was a line dividing me from the people I was defending. Now that line has been dissolved.   
First, political persecution is never about the individual. It is about an idea. You cannot kill or jail an idea. By persecuting the messenger, you strengthen it.
Second, this is a lesson that we, as the defenders of human rights, democracy and the rule of law, should learn and always bear in mind.  
Authoritarianism and populism are ideas that can never be killed.  They are always there in the shadows of the human mind and society, waiting for someone to expertly manipulate reality, or the people’s perception of reality, to make them seem like the one and true answer to all our woes.
The moment we think we’ve “won”, we slide into complacency and plant the seeds for the rise of the next populist or authoritarian ruler.  
Instead, we must constantly challenge the ideas they represent head on, bearing in mind what makes movements like authoritarianism and populism so attractive to people.  
That attraction isn’t irrational. It occurs because people are trying to act rationally but with an imperfect knowledge of the past, the present and the future. News flash: fake news and propaganda aren’t anything new. Only the platforms and the technology are new, making them more effective and powerful in manipulating people into making the wrong decisions.
Third, populists and authoritarians create the illusion of simplicity, compared with the “lofty” ideals of democracy and liberalism – ie, human rights, rule of law, democracy and freedom.  If we are ineffective in connecting these with people’s “real” daily needs, we will always be accused of being out-of-touch elites, paving the way for populists and authoritarians to step in.
A hungry man just wants to eat. A woman in fear just wants to feel protected. A parent whose child falls victim to the drug menace just wants to see the narcotics problem eliminated. 
That’s when a populist leader comes in and promises that these can be achieved, but only if sacrifices are made. That’s when he or she can boldly say that “human rights is the enemy”. By the time the people realise their mistake, they are little more than second-class citizens, living in subhuman conditions.  
To avert this, we must learn to speak to our people, not to talk over them, expecting them to see what we see. Because, as a victim, I realised that when you are trapped in the cell of your daily life, it is hard to see, much less care about, the big picture.
Finally, political persecution is a threat to democracy. Persecutors want their victims to be silenced, and for others to take heed and obey.  
But it is also a warning in another sense: it is better to be proactive than passive.  If I had kept quiet – as I was asked to do over EJKs – it would have been easy to assassinate my character if I had spoken out later. At least I had my track record as proof of my innocence.
If we stay silent once, we have to stay silent forever. We might as well admit defeat and surrender our humanity.
But, if it is true that “the hottest place in hell is reserved for those who refuse to take a stand in times of moral crisis”, I would rather be jailed in defence of what is right, than go to hell in the company of those responsible for our collective descent into impunity, fear and inhumanity. 

Leila M de Lima is a senator in the Philippines, and a member of the Liberal Party, a founding member of the Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats.