Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has pardoned Mary Jane Veloso, ending her imprisonment more than a decade after an Indonesian court sentenced her to death for drug trafficking.
Marcos said Friday that he had signed the pardon. Veloso returned to the Philippines in December 2024 under an agreement with Indonesia, after nearly 15 years in Indonesian custody and a reprieve granted shortly before her scheduled execution in 2015.
Indonesian authorities arrested Veloso in Yogyakarta in 2010 after finding 2.6 kilograms of heroin in a suitcase. She was convicted and sentenced to death. Veloso has maintained that recruiters deceived her and that she carried the suitcase without knowing it contained drugs. The pardon does not erase the Indonesian conviction; it exercises the Philippine president’s clemency authority over her continued confinement after the transfer.
The transfer arrangement preserved Indonesia’s judgment and treated Veloso as a prisoner on arrival in Manila, while leaving any later clemency decision to the Philippine government. That division of authority made the case an unusual example of cross-border sentence administration rather than extradition or a new trial.
The immediate legal consequence is release from the Philippine sentence. The pardon also closes a case that had become a sustained subject of diplomatic negotiation between Manila and Jakarta.
